La Voz de Galicia – May 10, 2026 →
It was the first time I had an expensive perfume. I hadn’t bought it myself; it had been given to me as a gift at one of those receptions I used to be invited to at the beginning of my career. I remember I kept it like gold wrapped in cloth, because the idea of using it every day felt like sacrilege, and besides, it was very intense. But I never really thought about that until it suddenly reappeared this week during one of my spring cleanings, those in which I move furniture and books around, open boxes and drawers, and things like that perfume turn up. There was still a quarter of the bottle left, and when I opened it to smell it, I thought about how I could use something like that if it’s not a scent I like. And that’s when I remembered the moment I stopped using it: during a relatively uncomfortable professional situation (which I won’t mention here), which led me to question why, at that stage of my life, I had decided to use that perfume for special occasions.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about the reasons why we do the things we do to present ourselves to the world. The clothes we wear, the shoes, the accessories, the way we express ourselves, the language we use or choose not to use — all of it adds up to create a version of ourselves that we feel represents us, even though most of the time what we are really representing is an invented narrative, a reflection of the reality we live in, or of the one we aspire to live in.
That expensive perfume probably symbolized something to me (God knows what I was thinking twenty-five years ago!), but I have to admit that, just as I can’t stand it now, I couldn’t stand it back then either. So I left the bottle where it was, and I was grateful that, over the years, I’ve learned to choose things not for what they represent, but for comfort and personal taste.
