Suitcases

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The suitcase is in the living room again. No matter how many times I do this, it never gets easier. Suitcases are supposed to evoke excitement.  Suitcases have always had the opposite effect on me.  They have always meant separation not relaxation.  From the time I was gifted my own tiny blue suitcase for visitations with my mother, suitcases started to be associated with pain, separation, and loss. Most people get suitcases out to travel together, to explore something new, to get a tan and rejuvenate. Not here.

The suitcases are in the living room again but only one is going.

Sometimes I imagine that our suitcases are animate. She watches her husband get selected to come downstairs to go on some journey each time the attic door opens.  She rarely gets picked. I hope I haven't given her a complex. I often think I'll take a vacation. I'll take a week or two and go traveling, have some "me" time, leave the kids with Hubs. Then I snap back to the reality of knowing that so much of our time is spent apart, that it would be too difficult to voluntarily separate for a vacation.  So, the female counterpart, the untraveled, will have to keep waiting until a time when we both can get away.  Surely, when her husband returns tired to the bone, weary from the troubles he has seen, overwrought with the joy of the surroundings from home and her warm embrace, she understands that he isn't going on a luxurious vacation even if it feels that way to the one he leaves behind.

Travel safe, dear men. We'll keep the home fires burning.