Overweight With Love
Packing suitcases
I don’t pack to journey. I used to. I would pack everything into a backpack and be off. Today, well, suitcases can be most unsettling.
It’s not like I can pack my talents, bloodstains, and mistakes, folded up with my dreams, shirts, pants, and toothbrush. Then there’s packing love, too, and that’s a risk, a battlefield, flares fired into the midnight of life, or tattooed onto the sunlight of a day that itself cannot be packed.
Heading into the airport one senses there’s no way I’m not getting pulled over by security.
The more I get to know myself the harder it is to justify my selfish behavior. It seems the older I get the less at ease I am. Maybe this is the way it should work. I don’t know. But, God, how hard I try to balance who I am with who I should be.
Even the best of us can be vulgar after dark.
Is this where it happens? Going through security at the airport?
Did you pack this suitcase yourself?
Christ, my knees start trembling. I’ve shed all suits worn in disguise long past. And now I’m forced to face my fear.
This woman security officer will X-ray my suitcase and learn I’m a needer and not a leader.
The security conveyor belt comes to a halt with my suitcase inside. She’s staring at the screen. I’m asking myself what mistakes look like through Xray, what talents are exposed, skeletons of guilt, and love, does it Xray like a fluid? Is it packed too much?
Everything is inside that suitcase, all the way back to the moment of her arrival, when she chose me — without applause — on one evening, without concentration, love was looked into and looked upon, and all of it is in my suitcase.
The security conveyor belt moves, and my carry-on suitcase appears on the other side. I look toward the female security officer. She smiles.
“Why do you look so tense every time we come through security, love?” Jenny asks.
“They always want to find something,” I said.
“But I pack your suitcase, honey. There’s never anything in there they have to worry about.”
I remain open and indebted for Jenny’s love and enthusiasm for all things: her generosity of spirit, her willingness to share what she knows, and for keeping me pointed in the right direction.
She links her arm into mine, pulling me in tight to her body, like being pulled into the most wonderful contentment.
At my side I haul my carry-on suitcase, packed tightly, but not by me, overweight with love.
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