Let that one go Francois…

It’s for the best,
most would say.
(All do say this, in fact. Except one forgiving soul who says: “perhaps…”)

Notes on surviving the trappings of silence when resolution and fresh air are the only thing fresh blood needs:

If someone’s baggage exceeds yours, then it is your job to fuck the sunshine out of the world and finally unfold that map from your back pocket- the one that is supposed to guide you out of a paper bag when confused by crinkles (or when you’re half in the bag.)

Your personal map, however archaic, (even drawn in the thickest toddler crayon, [some start early.]) This isn’t about one’s personal baggage though, (this is about the trappings of the “other,” right?) and will surely show some meandering path out of countless bag styles. Baggage styles include:

• The scary luggage with the impossible zipper.

• The small and ornate doohickey which looks so pretty from the outside but contains nothing but a buffalo nickel.

• The beat up leather one that proclaims one has “been around the block” but contains nothing but the same words written over and over in ball point pen.

• The simple backpack that claims one a practical traveler of the urban, suburban, and country. (I like this one, it has often been my choice: full disclosure)

Surely all of these open and close in order to serve their designated purposes. Our job. That is, my job, is to find one which does not contain stale air and ghosts with realistic attributes that I wouldn’t recognize in a line-up save for the wrinkles in their faces and the necklines of their shirts.

With that said: maybe you loved that baggage. Maybe it hurt you for a reason. That’s as good enough of a reason to become the amalgamation of jabs and stabs and sewn up parts that were so cleverly hidden in glove compartments, computer hard-drives, and books behind other books in bookshelves. There is a subconsciously clever part of slowly and unknowingly taking on the weight of situations that leave you in a foreign, yet familiar place. The hologram of a grassy knoll. There is also a part that hurts when you realize: “you could have been a person that revised my map, helped me out of my own baggage, made my life seamless in places where it has been leaking.” Then there is the part that walks away from the analogy and its ploy to comfort the shaking shoulders.

For all of these problems we are human and we are the coping shrinking bodies that revised textbooks and DSM’s love to pry into. We have not changed. Our dumbing down is coping and the summer months are coping. Watching plants grow from the earth is coping and listening to Earth is coping. Sleep is coping. Poorly worded justification is a cop-out. It all seems so smart and secondhand at the time.(above: one place.)