Opium

Like most things in my life, one scent can take me back to a certain point in my life or remind me of a certain someone. Smell is an important sense both mentally and physically. It can keep you safe, it can make you feel, it can help you remember.

With my mother's perfume, named Opium, it does not bring me back to the days of comfort spent with my loving mother, or of beautiful days when she'd dress in a summer dress and make fresh salad and cut fruit on a day when it was too warm to cook. It does not remind me of the romance she and my father held in their 18 years of marriage. It is none of that to me. 
The expensive fragrance only fell onto my mothers throat when she was full of guilt and lies. Days when the air smelled of her were days when the silence was filled with my father's never-ending questions. Days of second guessing and lies. That was the air I grew in.
Those nights, when she was at her ends with his persistant pushing and prodding, she'd dress in her finest lingerie while I sat behind her on their unmade bed. She'd paint her face up in the lopsided mirror, one of the only in our house, and coat her lips with blood red lip laquer. She'd perfect her fine hair with loose curls; my father's favorite on her. She'd find her best knee highs, the ones with the least tears, and slip her feet into one of her many vinyl stilettoes to match her lips.  After her final touch, the expensive perfume my father would struggle to afford to buy her for her birthday or christmas, she'd spin around and ask me how she looked.
'You're beautiful' I'd say while beaming up to her, already in my pjs and fully equipped with my Babydoll and puffy in my arms.
She's swoop me up into her arms, and tell me it was getting late for a young girl like me, nick at night had already taken over my favorite television station full of children shows, now only with teenage drama crap. She'd carry me to my bedroom while I'd make sure to position my arms around her neck in a way that wouldn't ruin her still warm, golden curls. After she'd tuck me in, I'd drift to sleep with the perfume that had rubbed off of me dancing around my throat like a rope about to tighten around my clavical. All the while, my mother was pleasuring my father into silence the floor below.
The day after, my father would always return to his usual state, either pretending, or really forgetting about the smell of another man on my mother's breath, or her not answering the home phone while he was calling from work. She'd always carry a grin on her face, knowing she had won yet again with her only prized possession; her body.