Phantom of No One

Three evenings ago, I broke my brand new perfume by accident and perhaps due to a my own clumsiness. It fell off my bag when I was trying to move the bag from my desk to my chair. The broken bottle landed upright after breaking into many pieces, leaving my floor with messy puddles of liquid perfume.

My reaction was instantaneous, but there was no tears or anger. Years of grieving over losing important items have numbed me into quiet compliance, unquestioning acceptance, and immediate troubleshooting action. Surviving childhood bullying made my brain no longer processes emotions as its forefront function.

I walked towards said liquid perfume puddles to remove shards of the broken bottle. After ensuring there was no more sharp pieces, I took my jacket off of the rack and proceeded to wipe the puddles with it. My exact idea was not to let any of the liquid goes to waste. The volume of spilled liquid perfume was enough for two jackets, so I decided my well-worn black leather jacket as another makeshift mop to soak the last bits of perfume left on the floor. Finished with perfuming my jackets, I moved on to check on my clumsy self to see whether or not I accidentally cut myself. Sure enough, there was a deep gash on my thumb with fresh blood seeping out. Chuckling softly to myself, I walked over to my bathroom sink to rinse off the seemingly endless dripping blood and wrapped myself with tissue to ensure no blood would splatter over any fabric or furniture.

Afterwards, I let myself grief. Quiet sobbing and gentle wailing included.

I don't want to degrade and discredit my sorrow for labeling my emotional response as ridiculous it had been described as in the past. However, I did not mourn over the fact that I lost a precious thing that I obtained from a nostalgic place a few thousands kilometers away.

My quiet sobbing and gentle wailing were the result of a solitary thought: I am truly alone in this world.

This is not in the sense that I am without anyone who cares about me, but more so because for most of my life I have spent it truly by myself and I have been trained to relegate tending my feelings over solving issues. Trust me, I know that it is imprudent to think that someone else could save you from your troubles, especially something as insignificant as having your perfume bottle cracked into pieces right in front of your eyes.

Yet, I couldn't help but coming into that same solitary conclusion again because my broken perfume is one of those instances in which I dealt with everything by myself. There was no one to tell the story to straight away. No one I could confide in about losing my brand new perfume and, along the same line, no one could respond to my confidence that it was perfectly reasonable to weep over losing my brand new perfume.

There was only me.

A little girl living in the body of a thirty-two years old woman gathering sharp edges, nursing scarred thumb, and sorting out her big feelings. A little girl sniffing the room, not because of her sniffles because that would come later, but because she could smell something that was not there. There was the smell of her own blood and the musky citrus notes of her masculine perfume, but there wasn't anyone else. Her masculine perfume was supposed to cling on someone else's clothes other than her own. But there wasn't anyone else.

And now, every time she comes into her room, all she could smell is the phantom of someone that was never here. All she could think is how much more loneliness can a body contain before it could burst the same way her perfume bottle shattered to the ground. All she could see is how heavy an empty room could be.