Alone in your room --
the walls are bare;
the drawers are empty.
In the middle of the floor,
two suitcases stare at each other
counting,
in disbelief,
the cubic centimeters of your life.

You put Yann Tiersen in your ears and pretend it's just another day.

Red line.
Silver line.
Airport.
To fit under the weight limit,
you take eight pounds of clothes
and feed them to the gaping mouth
of a garbage bin.

Past security and into no man's land.
The plane is late four hours.
Your grip on the world feels thin.
You hug your backpack and try not to disappear
like a helium balloon
lifted by the absence of keys in your pockets.

But still you're not entirely your own.
Memories pull at you like strings,
and they will have to stretch across
three more time zones now.

Home is where what is?

 

(I wrote a first version of this in May 2012, but I wasn't happy with it. Every few months, I'd try to edit it, get frustrated, and give up. This is just the latest iteration.)