I have been surviving
the past few years,
counting on my hands,
the days taking me,
to the impending end.
I will not.
I will not sacrifice my hands anymore for something so sacrilegious.
I color my hands with Vermillion, rub the pages of my noteboo...
fancy empty perfume bottles line once isolated row of grandma's showcase.
if one slides the glass a little to the right from the left or a little to the left from the right
they can smell the dusted spirit echoing from the walls of the gauze-colored insides within the showcase of the long-gone perfumes.
an array of scents, would surround you- sakura, rose, jasmine, chocolate, daisy, manly, fruity and others.
it would assault your senses, make you doubt, the clemency of the bottles in question, but all in good humor.
despite your growing concerns, you wouldn't dare ask its owner of the idiocy of collecting bottles that are empty and is cursed of incapability to contain anything else, a reminder, a fruit, a stationary, or a photograph in this century, or the next.
the immortal atomizer would ensure that no number of washing or scrubbing can get rid of years' worth of preparation, from those wretched bottles.
these scented ghosts, would haunt you, not for the emptiness, it bequeaths; nor because of the legacy it'd leave behind.
(the legacy being, colorful bottles now empty that once hugged every nook and cranny of a Lady's Shop, [Dior, Maybelline, MaxFactor] that would be inherited by my mother, I and my sisters, and our grandchildren, one day.)
no.
these scented ghosts, would haunt you, for years ago, a mortal spirit retched the essence of life from his pits by putting lean fingers down his throat.
memories of his childhood, coat the innards of those fancy bottles that trapped the genie of his colored happiness after he went.
he is grandma's younger son, and she misses him.
her older son, who works at the Lady's Shop (Dior, Maybelline, MaxFactor) in a different country, brings perfumes for gifts to hand over to family, extended family, nephews, nieces, and whatsit.
through her older son's gifts, or whatever remains of it, she remembers her another son, who is very much no more.
such is the cruelty of fate, such is the malevolency of life.
everytime I slide the glass pane open, I pull my lungs in, I smell deep.
I take the scented ghosts deep into the pockets of my soul.
I desperately try to find traces of some memory of my dead uncle, whom I never knew.
there is no inside joke between grandma, and her fancy bottles.
just sadness, and some more empty sadness.
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