I began my life within layers of perfume; inside intimate, warm, moist membranes immersed in scent. I cannot recall spending a single moment of my life without being surrounded by aroma.
It’s not true that we get so accustomed to a certain scent that it no longer has an effect on us; for whenever I feel that I may have become used to to the scent of Frangipani, it overwhelms me with its magnificence again every evening. I believe it must be the same with my own scent.
My scent is not governed by any law. It does not know fear, nor does it know death. It is excited by the rains, by imaginings and by memories. If you smell my scent once, I will nestle within the corridors of your memory forever; I will build legends, palaces and temples that will stay with you always.   
I don’t do that intentionally. My scent leads me to control this highly sensitive sense. It creates epic proportions of beautiful memories making them agonizingly more beautiful, and endows a distinctive beauty to painful memories making them more tolerable. My scent is what gives life its distinctive features and its deceptive, sharp boundaries. My scent tricks you, and you want it to trick you; like a dream which you believe to be real or a reality that feels like a dream. My scent makes life slither like a snake, gathering, twisting, weaving stories within its folds where the aroma lives.
All my beauty resides in my scent; my scent is my soul; for I am not considered beautiful by the usual standards, and there are many who are more beautiful than me. And because I have never been afraid of life’s impulsiveness, I didn’t hide and I didn’t avoid it, so my eagerness has caused some tears in my petals and in my leaves.  
This never bothered me. I never wanted to hide from the sun and I was never afraid of swaying under the melody of the rains .. and because I believed that imperfection is the essence of beauty, I felt that it this gave me something special that bears the hallmarks of my individuality.  Besides, the birds and butterflies didn’t come visit me because I am beautiful, but because I am aromatic.  
* * * Never for a second could I imagine going on with my life without aroma. This idea would not have even occurred to me had it not been for the fact that I started noticing that the aroma in my surroundings was diminishing. The scent of the Gardenia no longer greeted me strongly and excitedly in the mornings as it had always done before, and the Jasmines seemed much whiter, but… As for my beloved Frangipani, its scent was barely carried to me even on the strongest breeze.
I found myself the only one among my species to remain the same. Perhaps it was the tears that resulted from my passion for life that had saved me. Had it not been for the fact that I could still smell my own scent, I would have lost my mind completely. This drastic change in my surroundings caused great confusion for me. I felt as if someone had removed my sense of smell and I that I shall bleed to death. I could not distinguish between losing my sense of smell and losing whatever there was to smell; and in truth, I didn’t know which was worse.
* * *
Is being left alone the worst that can happen? 
So be it, let me be alone. I don’t want to tread this thorny path; I don’t care for trying to please the owners of vases. Day after day, the young flowers around me were being subjected to hybrid experimentation; they were being created and recreated, in order to become that which is believed to be the only face, the only measure of beauty, until finally they all become alike. Twins made up of thousands of siblings, all of them, I admit, far more beautiful than I.
So be it, let me be alone. I don’t yearn for this kind of beauty; a dead beauty that is created solely for the purpose of being cut and imprisoned inside a dead container that provides it with life’s minimum requirements. A lifeless container that neither shares its feelings and passion for life, nor does it allow it to grow or open its petals; and there, it stands alone, eventually abandoned by all except the webs of spiders.
Its splendor and perfection become tedious within days. It withers and dries, and is ignored, while another is cut to replace it, then another. There is not need to distinguish one from another. There is no need for joy or sorrow; its life is reduced to a short existence in exile away from its roots, away from the warmth of the sun and the song of the birds, and out of reach of the butterflies and the beautiful relationships it could have had with them.
Only I know that the butterflies will no longer accept these multitudes of twins, because they can’t engage their souls with crumbs, remnants of life that have not soul, no essence.
But I don’t know who else but the butterflies will weep for their kidnapped scent?

Fadwa

(have a look at the collage: http://fadwas-inspirational.blogspot.com/2009/06/kidnapped-perfume.html)