Sometimes it’s exhausting to be in the middle of life

Last week, I passed through a portal and ended up in my twenties

Half my lifetime ago and smelling of naivety, ambition and Chanel Mademoiselle

The portal opened on the cast of my life from that time, unexpectedly sitting around a table in a bar, in King’s Cross Station.

The scene smelt like Chanel Mademoiselle, the ‘grown-up’ scent I’d tucked in my suitcase alongside naivety and ambition when I first moved to London to study fashion at St Martins, almost half my lifetime ago.

There they were: my sister, my uni housemate, and my first Great Love from that era, whom I have not seen since.

The three people who taught me how to think, laugh and love, casually drinking Campari spritz, trying to locate behind the laughter lines, the old friends we once knew, and more urgently, our younger selves reflected in each other’s eyes.

There was no grand plan to meet, just a few chance messages exchanged in the hours before and a phone call, 'I’m just down the road, I’ll come now.’ Resulting in an alignment of bodies on the same patch of earth, and a reunion we didn’t know we needed.

That’s the thing about seeing those who formed us after such a long time: They’re often reassuringly the same and exactly who they were always going to be.

I thought about what it was like to know someone when they were young.
To know the shape of their handwriting, or how their body moves on a dancefloor. They are a part of you in ways new friends can never be, and when you seek out their perfume in airport lounges years later, the scent lodges in your throat like tears.

The old housemate no longer wears the saccharine notes of YSL Babydoll that once signalled ‘It’s time to go out dancing’ in our student house. She now wears Acqua di Parma Oud, the complexity suits her. My sister ditched the sweet spice of Mugler’s Angel years ago but carried the earthy patchouli base through to all the perfumes of her womanhood.

And the ex?  I didn’t get close enough to find out what had replaced the squeaky-clean scent of hairspray that broke my twenty-something heart neatly in two.
Some things are best left unknown. But whatever fragrance he wears, I am sure it’s more layered and complex like our faces, stories, and lives are now.

For a few days after the portal opened, a work project looped me back along the streets that had housed the girl I’d relocated in their eyes in King’s Cross Station.

Memories rose from the brickwork, the shells of buildings had changed, but the shadows were still the same.

It felt good to be slow, and alone for a while.

I slipped under and walked alongside her. I held her hand, and told her everything would turn out exactly how it was meant to be.

I then released the ghosts into the London sky.

They rose into the streets, fresh with the new cold of the October air that smelt like the synthetic perfume notes of others’ ambition and youth. 

To be turning 40 this month, and to have breathed in and out on all those street corners, to have birthed and died a thousand times, and to still have it all ahead of you, can be fucking exhausting at times.

One leg in the past, one in the future, the tectonic plates of life pulling you apart, and whispering that, although so much is formed and decided, there are still so many things we are yet to smell. 

Andy Warhol knew that to move forward, sometimes we’ve got to go back. He infamously wore a different fragrance every month of his adult life and then catalogued them away by date, to sniff when he needed to revisit the ghosts.

I spritz some Mademoiselle in a department store. The notes are heavy and brassy, far too complex for the girl I was back then, when I first arrived in London, alone: fleshy, raw, and barely formed. It’s a perfume for a life yet lived.

A life where she would meet the Babydoll housemate and sit up all night, smoking cigarettes out of Camberwell windows, talking until they lost their voices.

A life where she would feel the knife cut of being left (for the final time), on the steps in Soho that summer, when the tears poured on night buses and under strange bodies until the second Great Love walked through the snow in London Fields.

A life with freshly birthed daughters with the blinking eyes that said, ‘There you are! I know you, you are mine, and I am yours.’

She didn’t yet know how it felt to hold her sister and help her feed with the one good breast (cancer took the milk from the other one). And when the latch happened for the first time, she finally understood the power and absurdity of what it is to be a woman.

She could never know how it was to straddle the earth, in London, New York, Berlin and Somerset, putting down roots and digging up flowers.

She had not yet had the phone calls that rerooted life on different tracks in an instant, or the shame-filled fights and the joy-filled dances, the dark days and the dinners under the apple tree.
She didn’t know about any of that yet.

Portals always open at exactly the right time telling us that it’s not time to slow down and prepare for the end, but to dive back in. And when they open, we need to be ready to listen.

On the train back to the countryside, the portal closed and I was left with the paper card smelling of Chanel Mademoiselle.

I tucked it into my book, because she is still with me, and will always be, I just needed to let her back in, from time to time.