dumpster fire of a funeral

One day, you’ll find yourself down the rabbit hole, falling deeply and recklessly in love with someone. You’ll ditch your inhibitions, and blindly follow the bread crumbs of folly and fantasy until Father Time swiftly gifts you something so devastatingly acute. This is not a feeling that visits and sets up shop during your singularity. No, it comes one day as one of those cute hardshell rolling suitcases a few months into sharing a life with someone, and never goes away. 

It has no little white tag or barcode, nothing to identify it except for its ability to travel any distance alongside you and your person. It’s just simply there and it goes unnamed because neither of you can acknowledge that this uninsured trip you’re taking has no return date or transfer voucher. You’re each smart enough to anticipate a crash, but its gravity and timing is the surprise keeping you on your toes — imbuing a sense of erotic anguish that colors every moment together. Life as you know it will never feel the same, and it’s exhilarating because of the possibility of crucifixion, or equally as plausible — a safe arrival in paradise.

The real nuts and bolts holding this luggage together is an all-encompassing Fear. Fear of being exposed for your faults and failures, for your humanity and all those embarrassing features you so carefully tucked away from view. Impressively nimble, it fits into even the smallest compartments, where it lingers overhead and gets tossed about with turbulence big and small. It will gladly roll along forever if you let it, while conveniently stowing the items you don’t want to unpack just yet. 

But one day, the oxygen masks will deploy, and you’ll put yours on first. You’ll try to help your person but your hands suddenly won’t work and your body will be frozen as the flight descends at such rapid speed that you’ll sit there, paralyzed. That’s when you decide to mentally unpack the suitcase for one last look before it’s too late. Like you might have guessed, it’s overstuffed with your expectations and anger, regret and energy spent. You see that it so kindly took inventory of your passions and adultery, your missed opportunities and anxieties, too.  And finally, in this exact moment, you’ll stop postulating and punishing yourself because you no longer care to fix it all.

You begin to engage and talk quietly to it while softly picking up your semi-retired items, folding them, and smoothing over their ruffled edges with your fingers before placing them into neat piles. You smile as you recall this fight, or that fuck, and try to engage with the memory of something that no longer serves you. 

The only trouble in all this unpacking is that you don’t live in the climate you once did so there’s no need these particular items anymore. Anyway, you prefer less now, so after delicately sorting through your once beloved keep-sakes, you take a bottle of kerosene and light the thing up like one delicious dumpster fire of a funeral. 

Then you stand back, gasoline in hand and saltwater dripping from your cheeks, and let the flames engulf the lot of it, everything it was. 

“Right,” you say to your dog who’s sitting next to you, panting. “I believe that’s all of it.”

Then all six legs sit while four eyes dance with the flames as you ponder the new haircut you’ll be getting tomorrow — more widely understood as the first day of the rest of your life. 

You watch with fascination as the outer plastic shell of the suitcase begins to melt into a gooey pile of galactic waste and chuckle to yourself for how fucked up it all looks from your perspective. You think about the first time you said those three words and how he used to look at you like he wanted your gene pool for his babies. You recall feeling so untouchable in his arms when you were 23 and still kind of adorably stupid. 

Then you chuck the canister to the ground and spit on the fire for some cathartic masculine flex and turn to go back inside. The dog barks.

“Make sure it’s out before you go to bed,” you say to your four-legged friend and turn on your heel.

The plane is now seconds from meeting the ground, so you open your eyes and drink it all in.

“I did not care what it was all about. I just wanted to figure out how to live in it,” you say.