Luggage

Familiar faces, which look as if they were smothered by the tooth fairy, attempt to force out limp smiles and stale hugs at 9 am to other familiar faces aka strangers for the past three months. Boxes, luggage, and backpacks plummage through the rooms, and the only loot hoped for is the bed that awaits us: the bed that is not our own, but will inevitably cling to us and us to it for the next several months. Each year, a new bed awaits my caress, as she and me become we, creating humanity through saliva and snores. It is one of the few I take comfort in; she is surprisingly and inevitably the only thing that I trust. I trust her to accept me and take me in. I trust her to wrap her comforts around me, sinking me into the heart of her dreams as I dream of her. I trust that she will not look to my past and expect the same. I trust that she will not look to the future and forget my history. I trust that she will not even look at the present, for even the present moves, but time stands still when we are together, that makes the endless minutes between midnight and 8am seem like a blink.

Our gift of memory has quickly become our vice, clouding our minds to change, as it acts to be the 10-minute bathroom break during the scene when Edward Norton realizes Brad Pitt is himself in Fight Club, when Bruce Willis figures out he is dead in The Sixth Sense, and when Tom Hanks gets stranded in a deserted island in Castaway. You come back, screaming out WHAT HAPPENED? But everything has changed, and you can't ever get it back. The only difference is that summer vacations are the infinite alternate routes instead of just one that are taken before it becomes a collision course once again. Everyone is left out of the loop, changed themselves, and no one can ever figure out what happened in each other's lives, no matter how many heart-to-heart conversations are held. Someone press the rewind button, or at least buy me Tivo.

So here we are back from several climaxes of several stories, and Howie Day was right. We did somehow find that you and I collide. Please tell me he has a sequel to that song because he failed to answer what we should do from here. Let me take my luggage, put on a Dylan record, and ride into the sunset with nothing more than who I have become...

...and my bed.