Perfume
Among her things I found a bottle of perfume, it was the one she wore when we first met. I instantly was transported to the day, she is gone now but in that second I was there with her again. I smell her orange and powdery collar, her soft shirt collar, and the sea air.
This is what loss is like. First you lose them, but you still have that bottle of perfume, but one day the perfume runs dry, but you still have the bottle, but at the very end of loss, you fumble the bottle, desperate to smell her one last time, and that bottle breaks on the hard ground. On the ground, the hundreds of shattered glass pieces, impossible to gather, are the last time you will have her sweet presence in yours.
You get on your hands and knees, like a beggar, in supplication you grovel. Lower your nose to the floor until it touches the shards and inhale her for truly the last time.
They don’t make it anymore, it was a fancy custom mix she ordered made on the trip when you first met.
You sweep up the glass with your hand, all mixed with gravel and sand, and it cuts you. You wipe your tears with that bloody palm, and as you sob and cry you cup your hands to your face for one last taste of her. But all you smell now is the sent of your own blood, and the salt of your tears.
That is what loss is like. A perfume bottle, once it belonged to her, a shattered memory and now even her scent is now forever lost.
But my memory of a shattered perfume bottle is different, but maybe a loss still. In my memory, the broken perfume is actually a cologne. I can’t recall the name. I see a purple and green bottle, perhaps blue. The words cool water come to mind, but it was stolen from K mart so it could not have been too fancy.
We were on a shoplifting adventure, before we walked too far away from Iago’s house, we found a fresh tag. We traced the spraypainted letters with our hands, pantomiming the process. A car drove by and someone yelled, they are going to think we did it!, and we ran.
We were always trying to get away from getting in trouble, always running because no matter what we did, we weren’t supposed to be doing it.
The sky grew dark and the air got cold, and I felt that now familiar knot in the pit of my stomach when I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t.
Our little gang of fifth graders, maybe four or five strong, picked up another boy. He was from Togo’s neighborhood, far from our catholic school. He was a real little gangster and I’m sure the stealing spree was his idea.
We took our prizes to the empty back part of the store, I remember seeing lots of big soft spools of yarn. It was the sewing section. We stole and opened some scissors to cut open the packages of the other stuff we stole.
On the outside of the store, under a bright street light, we attempted to douse ourselves in stolen cologne. Who ever had it fumbled the bottle, I see it falling, and shattering with a radial explosion. The liquid moves downhill as we uproar our disappointment. Someone said, if we had a lighter it would catch and burn with an impressive flame.
