If the painting had eyes.

Last night, I went to visit my Grandpa who lives in the building right next to mine. I'm in my home country for my break right now. My aunt was there visiting him as well. As my aunt and my Grandpa talked about a book about Hajj, I looked at the framed painting above the couch my grandpa was sitting on. It's a painting of a road near a forest.  


Once upon a time, both the building that I live in and the one he lives in didn't exist. It was all one big house with no upstairs. All of my aunts and uncles [I have 4 aunts and 2 uncles] lived there since they were born and almost all of my cousins and I grew up there. That was until we all moved and my grandparents decided to split his land for his kids so that all of them had their own apartment to live in. For as long as I can remember, that painting had always been in the living room of my grandparents' house. It might've even been there before I was born. 


So as I sat there last night looking at the painting, I wondered, 'What if that painting had eyes?'.
If it did, it would know the whole history of our big family. It would have witnessed the coming of me and my cousins in to our first home, the ceremony in which each of us was named, possibly our first steps, the tantrums we through, my first tricycle I rode around in the living room and even further in the past -- my parents' wedding, my aunts and uncles' weddings. It would have seen all the trouble my mum went through before she and my Dad got divorced, the time when my uncle was struggling with Schizophrenia, the time when my Aunt got so mad at my Grandma that she slammed the door and went out of the living room... and more recently, my Grandma's sickness before she passed away, and  all the pain and grief my Grandpa must have gone through after that. It would have seen every birthday party I had until I turned about nine years old. 


That painting would know literally every single thing, the good times and the bad, that happened in our living room. 

The Cologne Bottle

When I was about 2 years old, my parents got divorced and I lived with my mum in my grandparents house. When my mum went to work everyday, my grandma would look after me. One of my aunts and my cousin and his dad also lived with us. Out of everything, there are some very little, rather insignificant things that I remember from those days -- like my grandpa's bookshelf near his bed, two plastic eyeballs that he kept in his drawer, the big red bottle of Vitamin C tablets and most of all, my grandmother's cologne bottle. It was a tall spiky cylindrical glass bottle. The cologne was yellowish green and had a rather strong smell that became the signature "Grandma's Smell". 


You know how when you're little and you get a 'booboo' on your hand and when your mum blows on it or kisses it, it magically heals? That cologne bottle was my 'booboo' healer. Even though it probably couldn't heal anything, my grandma had managed to convince both me and my cousin [who was two years older than I was] that it would. So whenever we hurt ourselves, she would give us a bit from her cologne bottle. This was a long time ago. Since then, both my aunt and my mum had moved to other houses and eventually I moved abroad with my mum and stepdad. 


My grandma passed away on the night of May 19th last year. It was during my GCSE's and I was very much torn up about it, especially because I couldn't be with her during her last days. I started flashing back to old memories with her and it took me back to the cologne bottle. I didn't know the name of the cologne and I doubted that they even sold it anymore since this was so long ago. But I remembered exactly how it smelled and how the bottle looked like. I asked my mum and my cousin if they remembered, and I even tried searching for it on Google [even though I didn't know the name] in my desperate attempt to smell the "Grandma's smell" again, but I had no luck. A few months after she passed away, I came back to my home country and looked around for it in shops but I couldn't find it. Eventually, I gave up and told myself they didn't make it anymore. 


Tonight, I went out to have dinner with my Dad. I was out of moisturizer, so I went to this little shop afterwards to see if they had the one I used. I looked all over for it and decided to go elsewhere when suddenly, I noticed something, the only one like it,  sitting on one of the shelves with the other cologne bottles. My heart leaped as I rushed to pick it up. It was my Grandma's cologne! I took the cap off and smelled it. It was exactly the same as what I had smelled over a decade ago. It was as if I had aged back to five years old, because I was literally jumping as I went towards my Dad, with a beaming grin on my face. Alhamdulillah! 

I came back home and uploaded a picture of it on Facebook titled "This look familiar?" to see if my cousin still remembers it, and he does! 


Oh, and it's called "Eau de Cologne NATURELLE" by René Pascal.