Carnival by Paris Hilton

Hi everyone!  Happy Easter to all!

I hope all your Easter dreams came true and stuff.  Maybe you colored eggs for no apparent reason. Never really understood the fascination with coloring eggs.  Or hiding them.  Or eggs and Easter in general.  I'm not religious but I can't imagine Jesus had eggs when he came back.  He probably had a lot of stuff to do, and if he was gonna eat anything why would it be brightly colored eggs.  I dunno why.

But I digress.

This weekend my boyfriend and I packed up the car at 7 am Saturday morning and trekked to Syracuse for Easter with my family and it was a loverrrly time.  I don't know why but for some reason, the first thing I like to do when I come home is take a shower.  There's something about taking a shower in your own home that is just sooooo comforting and I smelled like shit anyways.  So that's what I did.  And I'm sure you're like...ohhhkay thanks for sharing, it's really comforting that you're clean.  

But I found myself in a bit of a dilemma as I was getting all primped and refreshed afterward.  Ever since chemo, I've had a very keen sense of smell, and for that reason, I have a wide array of perfumes at my house...in Pittsburgh.  I really don't like not having perfume on, because even my own scent can sometimes be overwhelming (even with deodorant on).  Not that I smell bad but you know...I just like to smell good.

But there was only one bottle of perfume at my house in Syracuse, and there's a reason that this particular bottle stays at my house in Syracuse.  The perfume is called Carnival by Paris Hilton.  It's a really beautiful scent.  I thought so ever since I received it.  For my 18th birthday.  In the hospital on 7H. 

I liked it so much, that one day when I went in for a treatment, I sprayed my entire cubby with it.

My roommate that day was a girl named Robin, who had leukemia.  I asked Robin if she would mind if I sprayed the bathroom with the perfume, because I would feel better about using the disgusting hospital bathroom if I knew it smelled okay.  Robin didn't mind.

Robin didn't mind a lot of things.  She didn't mind--err, well, I'm sure inside she did mind, but never let on--the fact that her cancer required a treatment that kept her in the hospital for months at a time.  In fact, if I remember correctly, Robin was diagnosed in the beginning of March 2009, and this particular occasion was late April, and Robin had not yet been home from the hospital since initial admittance.  We had been roommates before.  I remember I was on the floor getting platelets one Saturday when they told me another seventeen year old had been diagnosed.  The following day, I went out to Target and bought her a Caboodles case and filled it with make-up, explaining to her that in my first weeks of treatment, I felt like absolute shit--what with the hair gone, including the fine hairs on my face (which, without those hairs, one looks like a dried out fruit), all of my skin dry, my body bruising with the slightest nudge and the all-too-true fact that when you feel like shit, you don't really shower as much as you should.  My note to her said I'd included some lotions, eye makeup, lip gloss, nail polish, and other beauty supplies to help her still feel like a seventeen year old girl, and not a sickly fixture of the pediatric oncology ward.  I actually think my gesture helped me more than it helped her.  For me, it was an acknowledgement that I was adjusting, that I was getting through, and that I could show others the way.  Haha "the way."  I'm like a cancer prophet.

So on this particular occasion, Robin and I were already well acquainted, and with her blessing, I drenched the bathroom in Carnival.  DRENCHED.  Everythinggggg smelled like Carnival.  Paris Hilton would've been proud.  Proud or disgusted.  I dunno.  To be honest I don't really care what she thinks since she can't get out of car without a crotch-shot being taken. 

It was springtime, and Robin was allowed to go outside to the courtyard and get fresh air, which she did every chance she got.  She and her boyfriend would wait until whatever medication or chemo she was getting was done dripping, call a nurse to disconnect her from the medicine-pole (or as I lovingly nicknamed, stripper-pole), and go outside to streak the sidewalks in chalk, and watch the stoplights.  She'd be out there for hours at a time.  Her mother took power-walks around the block, and would bring us pizza from Varsity on the SU hill, and always asked what she could pick up from CVS for me (this particular week, my chemo-craving was Pringles).

There's no real end or shape to this story.  It's really just a memory, but a vivid one, that I constantly have connected with the scent of Carnival by Paris Hilton.  I haven't been able to wear the perfume since, because I immediately think of Robin.

Which totally wouldn't be a problem if life wasn't unfair.

Robin, as I told you, was in the hospital for long periods of time, but her prognosis was a generally good one, or so I'd been told.  It was just going to be a long road for her.  But she dealt with it like a champ.  One day, while I was in the hospital for a low-grade fever, Spybabies dress shop brought in several prom dresses for Robin to sort through and try on.  Robin hung them from the curtain-rods on our windows.  She wanted badly to be out of the hospital for prom, but it wasn't a possibility for her.  She took it all in stride, though, and on prom night, got dressed up in the dress she'd chosen, and met her boyfriend at the top of the big staircase in the lobby of the hospital, and they took pictures.  She rode her medicine pole up and down the ward like a scooter for entertainment, sat with the nurses til the early hours of the morning, and watched movies in the cubby across from me.  The road was hard, but they were confident she'd make it.

And she didn't.

Maybe things with Robin weren't as promising as I'd realized.  But the way I saw it, Robin and I both had cancers with a relatively good prognosis, and yet here I am.  And where is she?

Where had she been?

Not to the prom.  Not to the movies on the weekends.  Not to the school assemblies, not to the mall, not to the parties, not to the final exams.  Not here anymore.

All of those "Nots"...

I smell those "Nots" when I spray Carnival by Paris Hilton.  All of them.  I smell the "Nots", and I smell the prom dresses hanging in the window of our room, and I smell the chalk on the sidewalk at the hospital, and I smell the Varsity pizza and the pringles and the chemo and the Caboodles kit full of make-up and the bag of platelets I received when I first heard about Robin...

But this weekend, when I found myself confronted by the bottle of perfume, I sprayed it.  On my wrists, on my neck, and then I held the bottle to my nose.  Took a big ole whiff.  Smelled all those things.  And then it occurred to me: I was always the person who could smell the "Nots".  The negatives, the bad parts.  And Robin...well...if Robin came floating down to Earth and I sprayed Carnival by Paris Hilton, she wouldn't smell the "Nots."

She would smell Carnival by Paris Hilton.  Because it is what it is...

Does it make sense?  I don't know.  But when I closed my eyes and remembered her...I realized that Robin and her sunny demeanor, and her medicine-pole-scootering, and her deal-with-it-as-it-comes attitude is something I want to be reminded of.  Always.

I just might wear Carnival everyday.