Lilac Colored Glasses

There are times when certain smells just don’t belong. Scents that most people find pleasant, I find sickening in certain contexts.

When I’m holding a three month old baby, with her toothless smile and tiny little pink sausage arms with their delicate, grasping fingers, I expect to smell that unmistakeable whiff of infant; the fragile milky smell of unsullied pores. When I cuddle her close and inhale the overwhelming and entirely false odor of her mother’s perfume, I cringe. This tiny, innocent girl child will inevitably and all too quickly enter a world where beauty is based on falseness: perfumes that cover up her natural smell, makeup that changes the beauty of her natural features, underwear that maximizes or minimizes her natural curves. Nowadays, to be beautiful is, for all intents and purposes, to lie. The smell of perfume clinging cloyingly to an infant, to me, is nauseating.

When I’m riding home on my bike, barely staying ahead of the roiling grey storm clouds overhead, breathing deeply the cold stone odor that permeates the air right before the storm breaks. When I angle my bright yellow steed down a narrow alley lined with windowboxes overflowing with colorful riots of petunias and I draw the cool evening breezes into my nose, I am unpleasently taken aback by the scent of perfume wafting from a partially open door. Suddenly my quiet, empty alley isn’t so private anymore. My unabashed appreciation for the fresh air is tainted by some unwanted chemical mix. My mind loses it’s grasp on the stillness and simple beauty of petunias on a rainy summer eve and wanders into the tumultuous terrain of the lives and interactions of other humans.

I don’t take enough time in my life to just stop and breathe; to absorb what little fresh, green air there is in this industrialized city. So you can imagine, it’s a bit of a personal tragedy when I do take a moment to take it all in and it’s draped in the tawdry, wanton tones of overwhelming perfume.

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