year in a bottle

I have this bottle of perfume I keep on my dresser, but I never wear it. I actually got it just to smell it. My sister smelled it once and said it smelled like the 80s. It is funny how a scent can be so significant to one person and be something totally different (or even nothing at all) to another. 

The smell of dewberry reminds me of Friday night movies at the mall.

The overwhelming scent of dishwasher detergent is every restaurant job I ever had. 

Drakkar Noir is the hallways of high school.

Orange tea is graduate school seminars.

The original Febreeze is being in Paris (I know, so weird).

I saw this perfume I mentioned in a Marshall's and the bottle was immediately familiar to me even though I had not seen it in more than a decade. When I went to college, states away from life as I knew it, I had a number of things to adjust to- the first being my roommate. 

She was a bona fide Houston debutante, hitting the campus with a purse for every outfit, the finest bed linens to ever see the inside of a dorm and an astounding array of beauty products- the perfume was one of them.

It turned out that she was the perfect roommate for me and one of the best people I met in college. I started borrowing that perfume in the fall and wearing it off and on throughout that first year on my own. 

It is independence and fear.

It is first love and real heartache.

It is being homesick and feeling empowered.

It is 18....right there in a bottle. 

{Image courtesy of deviantart}