Suitcases

At some point I became a person who lives with a suitcase under the bed. Ready for flight at a moment's notice. usually it was flight to somewhere; a few day's escape from work and pressure. Now my destination is unknown and escape seems unsure, but the suitcase still lives beneath my bed, empty and waiting.

Some live hand to mouth from a suitcase like it was second nature; others put down roots and never wander far from them. Leaving home for school, though, forced that strange suitcase schedule: living half the year in cramped quarters with starving smoking students trying to cram living in between books and beer. Half what you bring with you goes untouched for four years and gathers dust in a desk drawer you could put to better use; half what you need to live is left home and gets lost in some dark attic corner in your absence. For many students school becomes home only gradually-- the process is usually complete by graduation, by which time they have returned home to find it has abandoned them.

So when I moved back home after six years and two degrees, home was no longer really there, and I began keeping a suitcase under the bed in the room I grew up in. I itched to fill it and get back in my American shitbox and drive somewhere, anywhere.

My own suitcase was an oversize, softcover garment bag from a set my parents used to use. British racing green, almost, with a yellow handle, it had side pockets large enough to make it a great weekend bag: a sweater, a pair of jeans, and a nice shirt and pants to go with a nice dinner out for two.

There was barely room underneath the twin bed in my matchbox apartment at school for all my duffels and suitcases, each packed inside another like Chinese puzzle boxes, the green garment bag outermost, with the yellow handle sneaking out from beneath the bedcovers.

But the rush to run home after the last class of the week and pack that suitcase was the sweetest of all, to set off for that point oh so well known and live out of that suitcase for a few glorious days in another matchbox apartment where I would not be alone; to share the slim space in the twin bed of a loved one with her own suitcase peeking out from beneath the bedspread.

But sometimes those two suitcases stop meeting on the floor beneath the tiny twin bed as one lover packs theirs deeper and deeper beneath the bed, then moves it to an unused dresser drawer, and perhaps finally clambering on a stool to perch it on a dusty closet shelf too high for her five foot frame to reach before selling it for wine money on a dry night. It is forgotten, and too deeply buried among the dust-bunnies to be pulled out at a moment's notice. The matchbox apartment takes on a new life, as more and more of the things left at home find some nook of their own to live in until home becomes only a vague recollection of where you came from before you got where you are now.

For the other lover, the suitcase stops making it as far as underneath the bed, because it's still laying around on the floor with a few wrinkled shirts and a ratty old sweater in it, waiting to go somewhere. Nothing is stranger than the feeling you get from living out of a suitcase in your own house; that feeling of hovering in limbo between a home you can't quite find your way back to and some uncertain destination down an unseen road. And the suitcase sits there on the floor, or perhaps on the passenger seat of an American shitbox, unwilling to resign itself to exile among the closet dust-bunnies; just waiting to be filled up, and finally given a place to go.