Hermes and Other Things

It's January 1, 2026 and I rang in the new year smelling like my old self.

I bought a bottle of perfume on my inaugural visit to the Magnificent Mile back in 2017. I really didn't have money to spend on expensive perfume. I’d just moved to Illinois from Louisiana and all my old problems would be arriving with my household goods and furniture soon enough. But as I walked through Neiman Marcus in downtown Chicago I felt like I deserved something that said look ma, I made it! I wandered around the summer displays and eventually ended up in cosmetics where this super slender woman dressed like she had just attended the funeral of someone famous or powerful basically assaulted me with scent. Galop d’Hermes.

Thinking back, I really liked it because I almost didn't like it. It smells like leather and some kind of dark flower that should be poisonous. Back then I was in the process of poisoning my own life, so it fit.

Before the clock struck midnight on 2026, I was going to get rid of the old. I purged makeup and brushes and hair ties and toothbrushes and floss. I vowed, as I purged, to finally become a grown-up with a routine. Not a RESOLUTION, of course, because resolutions are for quitting- but, a course correction. A software update. A routine. Something that, if I could actually stick to it, might make my days easier and my brain less cluttered.

I knew I was going to have to address the Hermes. It's a beautiful bottle- heavy steel or some kind of metal that looks like polished silver. It's meant to be refilled with the expensive fragrance. It's meant to be KEPT. As soon as I pulled it off the shelf that's it's resided on untouched for the better part of five years, I felt relieved at the prospect of chucking it in the big black trash bag along with the Victoria's Secret sprays and the one-quarter full body butters that had long congealed into forceful solids even though they still kind of smelled okay.

I picked up the Hermes. Felt the weight of it in my hand. I remembered the smell. And then, as if I needed to prove something to myself, I sprayed it. Not into the air where I could just catch a few molecules and think, "Yeah, that smells like the pain of the past". No. I sprayed it toward my chest, where I anticipated it landing like a dagger.

I waited for it to trigger the memories of cold winter days when I didn't know what was going to happen next in my life. I waited for the memory of the days where I sat in my car parked at this tiny church down the road from my new house, facing its cemetery and envying the people under each stone. I was jealous that they no longer had to have uncomfortable conversations or make decisions about money or love or suffer through the confusion of relationships.

My car used to smell like the Hermes, because it was that good. It permeated anything it touched with a richness that, when I purchased it, I imagined was the reason why wealthy people bought these kind of perfumes. It was meant to hang around like a signal cloud, a pheromone that alerts lesser people to more.

But I was not more. I was so much less in those days that I could barely see myself. My reflection in a mirror was merely proof that I was still alive, even though I'd much rather have been dead.

So I held the bottle in my hand, the strength of the scent now on me and all around me. Dust dulled the bottle, but it was still strong. Regal. Expensive. I turned it over and over in my hands, going back and forth on whether or not it should be thrown away. Maybe getting rid of it wasn't the point; maybe I finally made it past all that. Maybe the memories that didn't come back like I thought they might were finally tucked tightly away enough that the perfume bottle was just a perfume bottle.

I grabbed my microfiber towel, the one I'd been using to judge the things in my life I was letting go of- bottles and brushes and trinkets that were deemed salvageable and save-worthy got polished and placed somewhere that my neurodivergent brain would be better able to remember that they exist.

The bottle was- is- very pretty. I couldn't remember exactly what I paid for it, so I looked it up online. I looked up whether or not I could get a 'refill'- but something about bringing that bottle back to Neiman Marcus in an attempt to get a refill felt like a personal betrayal- do wealthy people do that? I bought this super expensive perfume, and I'd like to get a refill. I mean, it's not a coke. How embarrassing would it be to have an ambiguously-aged cosmetic counter attendant dressed in clothes I also can't afford look at me strangely when I present a slightly-knicked-up Hermes perfume bottle for service? They'd probably talk me into a different, more "in"- and more expensive- scent and then laugh at me later with all the other overdressed Neiman Marcus employees hanging around the espresso machine they keep in place of a water cooler in the break room.

No thanks.

The Hermes logo is engraved on the bottom. I polished it until it shined again. I decided it would stay, but I would never spray it again.

As 2025 became 2026, I decided to let myself continue to inhale the scent of my past. That, like a canker sore you can't keep your tongue out of, I would bask in lingering remnants of the worst pain I've ever known. I'd remind myself every time I caught a whiff, how it really doesn't hurt anymore. That it's so close to just being a scar, maybe this year it'll finally be gone.

Midnight came and went, and I woke up to the lingering scent still on my chest, right under my nose. I ate breakfast. I lingered on social media, a thing I've told myself I would do so much less of in the New Year. I took a nap. Went for a run. It wasn't until I showered, until the hottest water I could stand washed away the lingering molecules of leather and poison that I was finally free.

Finally free.