It's amazing how evocative scent is. I used a shower gel that an ex had given me way back in the first year of uni. It was an incredibly gorgeous, expensive one, so I used it sparingly, and then for a long while stopped using it because I was worried about what that scent would do to me again. This was, of course, much much time after a long, slow, painful breakup.
And I actually found the same brand in an outlet shop for ridiculously cheap the other day and got some more, and the moisturiser as well. And I dont know, I shouldn't have used it the day I did. I was sick with fear anyway. Trying to know what to do with my heart. Its little broken pieces. I cant seem to protect it, I am compulsively unable to give myself the distance it so badly needs. The plaster cast would be built of a wall between a friend and me. It would hurt so much more, and so much less, at once.
And I couldn't help thinking if I partly couldn't sleep because that moisturiser, that smell, was the smell on my skin in my first year of uni when i was with Jonny, regret of my entire life. Half-forgotten and irrelevant and still somehow, a Voldemort-like presence. I hate any one of my friends who mentions him, but skirts him, in that hedgey way as if I'm still not over it. Yet I can feel the confusion if I say his name, divulge a memory. The feeling of 'If you've moved on, Nicole, why are you bringing him up?' Well, he was heavily involved in two years of my life. It would be unhealthy never to talk about him, despite the lack of influence he had over who I am and what I really am, despite the years I spent doing everything romantic or fun with other people because he was so absent.
I cant deny, he's the reason behind so much deep pain that has yet to go away. The reason I'm full of mistrust, the reason I think that whenever someone seems at all distant towards me I fall into despair/freak out.
So was it the scent, or is it the knowledge that the deeper wounds he gave me are still hurting today through the influence of other people?
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