The Weight of a Suitcase
The suitcase is too heavy, and I already know it before the woman at the counter says her quiet accusation, before she asks — not unkindly — if there is anything I might leave behind. I say no. What is in the suitcase are only things that can't go into a home for good use like a new sweater that has been ripped up and worn by someone else and is becoming all but uncommon and doesn't hold the shape of my shoulders, a really nice sports jacket however disappointingly acquired from a donation room at a hospital disappointingly belonging to my estranged child I chose light in the dark of a closet because there was no time to choose well, only to choose what I was told. She weighs it again. She lets it through. Some mercies come disguised as indifferences
I stand back from the counter and let the terminal happen around me the way weather happens, without asking permission. This is a place built entirely for getting loste and endings, though nobody designed it to look that way — the ceilings arch too high, the boards flicker their destinations and the whole architecture insists on movement, onward, as though grief might be outrun by the momentum. Yet everywhere I look, there are…