HOME, ABROAD II
Hello. Here I am again, pre-dawn, the usual thing (coffee, cats, Vince gnawing on a nice pair of shoes), writing another list of things to do before I leave today.
Goodbye, I’m going to the gallows.
I wasn’t intending to write before I left; I didn’t have it in me. No space between the bolts of panic, the hot wires of stress stringing through. These, at the end of the day, and the beginning of it, are the close cousins of terror. Yup, I’m going on holiday. I’m going ‘home.’
Don’t worry, this is mostly my baggage talking. It’s a suave olive-green body bag I’ve borrowed from Willy. For now, it slumps on the kitchen table; once I get my hands on a winch, I’ll leaver it out to the Uber, and me and my baggage will be on our way.
And it’s ok. I need my baggage; it’s the baggage which will help to remind me I’m me. It will be my bag I see articulating around the suitcase carousel. My undies that splay like chicken skin across the front of someone’s Hermès roll-along.
I will need reminding because I have had a tendency, over the years, to lose myself.
“Have a nice life,” is what my father said to me, March 10, 1993. He had his hands in his pockets; he was already backing away. But he didn’t mean it. I don’t mean he didn’t mean to be mean; I mean he didn’t mean “nice.” He didn’t want my life away from him to be nice.
So here he is, still. He followed me; hitched a ride in the wheel well of that 747 to St. Louis, Missouri, and sits here now, chuckling a little, as I frenzy (a girl undone) through my newly neat system of files.
I can’t find my passport. I won’t be able to go…
AB - 3.11.23