Suitcase

(Sitting in the center of the bedroom, around miscellaneous belongings and other unfamiliar things; looking open and vulnerable like a human. This is, essentially, a personified version of a suitcase.)

Your mother will miss you when you’re gone; you can hold me when you’re homesick. Your ex lover would have forgotten about you; you can punch me with memories and worn souls until my back is as black and blue as yours. I will hold your tears, I don’t mind. I will fold your clothes into love letters and apologies.

(Take the belongings scattered around the bedroom)

When your father calls and asks if you still have the ring grandmother gave you, I will have it safe and sound. I will keep with me all the picture frames you don’t want to look at. When the hotel room is scattered with ancestry and diary entries, you may fill me up with all you have. You’re the last thing that keeps me from being a casket. Drag me along the dirt, suffocate me in the trunk of 8AM Taxi, smear my face with guilt, with mourning, with running away, with running home, and kiss me goodnight when the plane departs. Leave me, lose me, find me, rip me apart and put me back together; do to me what everyone else has done to you. They’ve gone away now; the keepsakes you’ve tucked behind my throat are all you have.

(sitting on the floor of the bedroom, staring up.)

I am a detached umbilical cord shaped like flags I’m not supposed to hold and I do not want by body to be an atlas anymore. I bear burdens that look like mountaintops of countries and passports plastered on my chest like crucifix. I will marinate every remnant from your lineage with the scent of lost land. I am a prostitute to native country, and a nomad of culture without pulse. Whenever I see the faces of heritage, I cannot help but take what I can; I want to learn about how your body speaks, and how your tongue moves. I want to know what it’s like to sit at a dinner table. I want to know what it’s like to be surrounded by faces that look just like mine, I want to know what it’s like to come home.

I looked at myself in the mirror yesterday and all I could see were tally marks. I counted every time I had killed myself and took along another life to a destination I could not remember. I stood tired, I felt bones, I tasted like empty room. There is nothing more that a world could give if you have already taken everything that it can show. There is nothing more that a body could give if you never get a chance to own it. I put a price tag on the tip of my ear and crawled into a plastic bag. I do not need to be an atlas if all I have left to be is a closet. So long, bon voyage, do not wake me when the plane lands.