My Mother's Perfume

With tiny faltering steps I walk into the white room that fills me with darkness.

The smell of white lilies floating peacefully all around.

The smell fills my senses, failing my mind, transporting me back in time.

There I was, balled in the tiny dark corner, scared with the demons all over 

And there she was with outstretched palms full of freshly baked cookies  

She smells of hope and of homes  

And I clutch into her delicate fingers

She's my mother you see 

She pulls me onto her lap and lovingly traces the lines over my face

"I love you'' she coos perhaps the first one to do so and mean it too.

The warden smiled above,'' she is a lovely child you see,  

She will fill your life with immense happiness and joy'' she chirped  

But why couldn't she smell the slowly burning kerosene of loneliness in her  

Or was it just me and so I prayed to heaven and all those above.

That will the sweet smell of my innocent childhood be able to somehow,

Miraculously fill that nameless void in her that she has saved all these years.

The same one that she wears not as a badge of honour but as a lifeless scar, 

An ugly reminder of life's own little cruelties 

And yet all I am greeted with is silence and uncertainty

The dread smells bitter in my mouth but it is soon forgotten

In her loving gazes and the homely smell that engulfs me when she is around.  

 

The thread of time flows and flows till destiny unfurls about  

She gives me shelter in the corner of her heart,

I grew up to be the apple of her eyes  

For isn't that what the people murmur around?

She blinds the world with her act and she is blinded by it too.

But behind those walls that smell of hearty giggles and sweet peaches 

Lays the smell of painful goodbyes and dried tears, of silent pleas and those screams.   

No, her hair doesn't smell like cherries

And her pockets aren't filled with crumbs of my favourite goodies  

She now smells of lost hope and broken homes 

Her mouth no longer decorated with a smile and the twinkle in her eyes is missing by miles  

And all I find in her is the smell of the last remains of the living inside of her  

The lily of love and life that once bloomed in her  

Its petals are now falling away and the mask is coming off  

For the aroma of the cookies was to just hide the dead around.

I had my hair braided, my bare arms clothed and memories made  

With those same hands that now smell of blood  

That smell of ugly truths, unpaid bills, and those red pills.

She lived and she loved the sweet fragrance of lily that she gave off,

But the cruel world snatched it away and turned it into the ugly stench of the dead inside her.  

And so today as I enter the morgue, 

I know she is around  

The aroma of her soul spreading its last wings for a final flight 

 I break down, my knees wobble and my heart is murdered by the smell 

For I hadn't yet bid a goodbye  

''It's my mother's perfume'' I cry  

The metallic tang, the dead white lilies and the nauseating death all around. 

When my lifeless eyes look at the shiny razor resting in my palm

The same one that robbed her smell, snatched my hope, my mother's perfume.

I gently clasp my fingers around it, 

The red that drips down from my arm smells a lot like her,

Like my mother's perfume and that's when I realized 

That I was my mother's perfume all along.