The Lift at the Insurance Building Taught Me to Hold My Breath

The morning I stopped wearing anything at all

I remember the exact day because it was my niece's christening, and I spent most of it in the church car park in Pinetown with my forehead against the steering wheel. The service had barely started. Someone two pews ahead had come in wearing a heavy floral spray, the kind that arrives a full second before the person does, and by the second hymn the right side of my head had begun to tighten like a strap being pulled through a buckle. I knew the sequence by then. First the strap. Then the light going strange and grainy at the edges. Then the nausea that made me grip the wooden pew and count my own breathing.

I made it outside before I was sick. I sat in my car with the windows down and the Durban humidity pressing in, and I cried, partly from the pain and partly from something harder to name. My sister found me there afterwards, still in my good dress, mascara gone. She said, not unkindly, that I always seemed to find a reason to leave. That stayed with me for years.

I am in my forties now. The migraines started properly in my early thirties, and it took an embarrassingly long time to work out that fragrance was one of my triggers. Not the only one. Skipped meals, red wine, the barometric drop before a Highveld thunderstorm, all of those too. But scent was the one that ambushed me in public, where I had no control and no exit.

Learning the geography of avoidance

You do not realise how much of the world smells until you become afraid of it. I built a private map of places to avoid. The perfume hall at the department store in the Pavilion, obviously, where the air itself seemed thick enough to chew. But also the lift at the insurance building in town where I went once a month to sign papers for my mother's estate. That lift was the worst. A metal box, no airflow, and every second person stepping in fresh from spritzing themselves at their desk. I learned to take the stairs, six floors, in heels, rather than risk it. My colleagues thought I was health conscious. I let them think it.

I stopped wearing fragrance entirely. That part felt logical at the time. If I could not bear other people's, I could hardly justify my own. So my bottles went to the back of the bathroom cabinet, behind the plasters and the expired sunscreen, and there they sat gathering a soft film of dust.

What I did not expect was how much I would miss it. Not vanity, exactly. It was more that a small daily ritual had gone quiet. The little dab before work. The way a scent could lift you out of a grey Monday. My late mother wore the same eau de toilette for forty years, and when I smelled it on a stranger, before the pain arrived, there would be one clean second where she was alive again. I gave all of that up and told myself it did not matter. Chronic pain teaches you to be a very convincing liar, mostly to yourself.

The years of saying I was fine

For a long stretch I was, quietly, a diminished version of myself. I turned down dinners in small restaurants. I sat near doors. At my cousin's wedding in Ballito I spent the reception on the veranda, watching the dancing through the glass, because the ballroom was a soup of a hundred different sprays and I could feel my skull beginning its familiar warning. People assumed I was aloof. The truth was I was calculating, always calculating, the distance between me and the nearest fresh air.

I saw a neurologist eventually, a patient man in Westville who did not roll his eyes when I listed my triggers. He was the first person to tell me plainly that avoidance was a reasonable strategy and not a character flaw. He also said something I have thought about often since. He said the goal was not a life with zero pain, because that life did not exist for me, but a life where I made room for a few things I loved anyway, carefully. I did not know what he meant then. I do now.

A dab, not a cloud

The change came from an ordinary afternoon and a friend named Thandeka, who has known me since teacher's college and has watched me leave a hundred rooms early. We were sitting in her kitchen in Kloof and I noticed she smelled faintly lovely, warm and close, like something you would only catch if you leaned in for a hug. I braced automatically. Nothing happened. No strap, no grainy light. I asked her what she was wearing, half suspicious, and she told me it was not a spray at all but one of those perfume oils you dab onto your wrist. It sat on her skin, she said, instead of hanging in the air.

That distinction turned out to be everything for me. The alcohol sprays I had feared for years work by throwing scent outward, a fine mist that diffuses across a whole room and rushes up the nose all at once. An oil does not do that. It stays where you put it. It warms slowly against the pulse and drifts perhaps as far as your own collar, no further. Thandeka pressed a tiny sample into my hand before I left, the way you press a secret on someone, and told me to try it alone at home where I could stop the moment my head complained.

Testing it like a scientist, feeling it like a girl

I was cautious to the point of absurdity. I put the smallest touch on the inside of one wrist, in my own kitchen, with the back door open and my car keys ready in case I needed to escape my own house. Then I waited. Twenty minutes. An hour. The scent stayed low and quiet against my skin, and my head stayed my own. I actually laughed out loud, standing there by the sink, at how small the thing was and how large it felt.

Over the following weeks I grew braver. I learned that a scented oil perfume behaves differently on the skin depending on the day, the heat, whether I had walked in the sun, and I found a kind of pleasure in that attentiveness I had not expected. There is a paradox in it. Fragrance frightened me for a decade, and now here I was reading up on how scented oil perfume is layered and how a little goes a very long way, the way I once read up on my triggers. The same care, pointed at joy instead of fear.

I still take the stairs at the insurance building. I still sit near doors, and I will still leave a room if someone arrives in a cloud, because a heavy spray in a lift can undo me as fast as it ever did. My condition has not been cured by any of this, and I would not want anyone to think it has. What has changed is smaller and more precious than a cure. On an ordinary morning I can now touch a little warmth to my wrist and go out into my day feeling, again, like a woman who smells nice on purpose.

What I got back

The first time I wore it in public was to a Saturday market in Hillcrest. I stood among the stalls, coffee in hand, and every so often I would catch the faintest trace of myself, low and private, and it made me feel absurdly whole. Nobody near me flinched. Nobody stepped back. I was not a hazard in the air around me. I was just a person at a market who happened to smell of something soft.

I have thought a great deal about why it moved me so much, a thing as ordinary as a dabbed wrist. I think it is because chronic pain does its damage not only in the big dramatic episodes but in the thousand small surrenders you barely notice yourself making. You stop lighting the good candle. You stop the little dance in the kitchen. You stop the dab of scent. Each one feels sensible in the moment. Together, over years, they hollow you out.

When Thandeka asks me now, teasing, whether I have become a convert to oil based perfumes, I tell her it is not really about the oil. It is about the fact that I had quietly agreed to give something up, and then found a narrow door back to it that my body could tolerate. That door happened to smell of amber and something warm I cannot name. I walk through it most mornings now, gently, on my own terms, and I no longer hold my breath in lifts because I am ashamed of taking up space with my own skin.

My sister came for tea last month. She leaned in when she hugged me and paused, and said, you smell lovely, when did that come back. I did not have the words for the whole ten years, so I just said, recently. She squeezed my arm. Sometimes the smallest reclaimed thing is the one that tells you you are still in there, still yourself, still capable of pleasure between the bad days. I sat there in my own kitchen, head quiet, and felt, for once, entirely present in my own life.