THE OPIUM

“Smell is beyond words. It was in the beyond-words place that we were okay together.”

By the time she died, my mom and I had different taste in almost everything. Colors. Clothes. Me. But we agreed about Opium. The perfume, not the drug. We may have agreed about the drug too, but we never talked about it. My mom was not big on talk. Ever. And she had the forgetting condition, so by the end there was almost no talk. Once when she wanted to refer to my new maybe-boyfriend, she held up two fingers and scissored them from a V to an I. I knew what she meant immediately. Without words. And maybe that was true of Opium, too. Smell is beyond words. It was in the beyond-words place that we were okay together.

After she died my dad was anxious to be doing things, to accomplish away even one drop of his tsunami of grief. They’d been together since high school. And were famously one of those two-peas-in-a-pod couples. I was anxious to sit and move through my feelings, but he was moving through the house urging me to “take anything you want.” So, to honor his more-pressing distress, I attempted meet him in the world of stuff. I wandered around their neutral-toned rooms trying to be open to whatever of my mom’s might call out to me. “Check the bathroom,” he said. Which otherwise I certainly wouldn’t have. And there was the Opium.

It was the scent I’d worn during a marriage that had recently ended. After I’d finished my last bottle, I’d had neither the cash nor the desire to replace it. I did desire perfume, though. And because at that time I was, as they say in recovery, “hitting bottom,” I’d begun to define my relationship to God, and as part of that, had started experimenting with prayer. 

One day, crying on my knees in a sublet I was crashing in, I’d pleaded to God: I know I’m not supposed to pray for material things, but please, if you could just let me have some perfume I think everything else will be okay. The next day the guy I was renting the room from told me he’d won a gift box in a raffle and wanted to give me something from it. “Take anything you want,” he said. And there in the center of the box was a bottle of Gucci Guilty. One day after my guilty prayer. I realized then that my God had a sense of humor. And that for me perfume would always represent the presence of what we can’t see. The magic of perfume was real.

I’d worn perfume casually in high school. Sometimes copping a spritz from my mom’s Shalimar. Sometimes swiping on a cheap stick perfume my boyfriend had Valentine’s Day-ed me. But during college and the starving-artist years, there was no perfume, not even a whiff of a thought of it. 

Then I moved to L.A. And when you move, you change. And among other, bigger changes, I realized I wanted to be someone who when you hugged me, you’d have this whole other delightful sense experience. That's still true, but since we're now living in such un-huggy times, perfume has become more about the moment I spray it on. I like to mix and match. The one from the person I do hug, daily, goes around my heart. The one I bought to replace a bottle a music friend gave me (the day I came home with the Opium—more magic!) goes behind my ears. And then the Opium: usually around my third chakra, the I-mean-business chakra.

It’s been almost three years since she died. The bottle is two-thirds done. I’ve been spraying it sparingly, but eventually all that amber will have melted into my skin, diffused into the air, and when it’s gone I’m going to feel like she’s gone, all over again. So sometimes I’m tempted to refrain. Because let’s face it, even if there were an endless supply of those bottles, there'd never be another one that was hers. But I’ve decided that’s no reason to not use it. In fact, it’s exactly the reason to use it. For me, using it and making peace, one gorgeous-smelling instant at a time, is the way to go. The way to go for letting go. That’s perfume magic, right? And I think she would agree.

—Beth Lapides

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Beth Lapides is the creator of the legendary alt-comedy show Un-Cabaret, author of the audiobook So You Need to Decide and creativity coach at The Infinite Creator.