Third

I remember the scent of my auntie’s jewellery box vividly – an olfactive concoction of chypre, Chinese medicine, bergamot, hyacinth, sandalwood and powder notes. Whenever she invited us to her place, I’d suddenly leave the table, disappear from the living room and sneak into her bedroom, open the cabinet glass window and take out the jewellery box, almost too heavy for me to carry too far. So I’d just leave it right there, on the floor, open it in perfect amazement and forget about everyone and everything. Right there, in front of me, was everything I needed. No children to play with, no Barbie dolls, no other toys, not even the many lazy cats, lying around me, waiting to be abused seemed that interesting anymore as a real treasure was to be discovered, triggering and awakening all my senses at once.

By that time, I had entirely given up on collecting miniature cars and pretend-winning races and  started developing more and more feminine traits, so much so that dad was calling me “magpie” because I was curiously drawn to all things that sparkled.

Believe you me; turning my auntie’s jewellery box upside down would have been any little girl’s fantasy play date. And this little girl was absolutely fascinated by what she’d encounter. She could have spent hours and hours in front of it as if hypnotized by all the unfamiliar smells, shapes and purposes of the fragile miniatures, reminiscent of other times and places. Discovering all those broken pieces of the past, running her fingers through the delicate strings, feeling the textures, observing the intricacies, even getting pricked by sharp objects left loose in there was something she very much enjoyed.

The mess was undeniable and so was the danger of getting stabbed or poked or cut, but there was such beauty to it, this brave little girl didn’t care about anything else (self sacrificing in the name of beauty was a lesson that had to be learned anyway, womanhood was never meant to be easy-breezy).

Inside the box, my auntie’s lost youth came in all kinds of shapes, sizes and dissipating mem’ries: long, discontinued necklaces, silk ribbons for a Cocktail dress she’d never worn, her favourite brooch, broken, massive metal bracelets, intertwined, small plastic diamonds, sparkling, a silver “Gemini” pendant she always thought she’d lost at a party she didn’t even want to go to in the first place, loose fake pearls, her mother’s Amethyst earrings and wedding rings and two ceramic flowers, chipped – each of them, flashbacks of her husband’s eyes staring back at her on a random Tuesday evening: his features, his grimaces, two sepia toned photos of them holding hands on a perfectly sunny day in 1978 (she still adores that man, decades after his earthly demise), something that looked like bread crumbs, her younger daughter’s first hair lock, treasured in a small paper bag, the other daughter’s dried belly button, two large silver coins, but mostly things that had no beginning, no end.

I treasure such childhood memories, because they have somehow shaped me and my creative process; whenever I open a jewellery box I’m in awe, absolutely fascinated by the wonderful surprises inside, the forgotten world it carries within and yes, my art might be a messy thing to look at, a concoction of everything and anything, but to me that is raw beauty, something that absolutely needs to be further explored unapologetically.

Green Eyed Kisses,