You Want to Be

 Suitcase in hand, you head to the station. It is about time you get out of the house and start seizing life like everybody else. 

Just as you reach the door you are stuck with the sudden fear that you have left your hairbrush sitting on your hardwood dresser upstairs. You quickly plop your purple hard shell suitcase on the couch and kneel down to open it to make sure that your plastic orange comb is nestled in the bristles of your blue dollar store hairbrush. 

You see the pair of groom devices laying on top of the bed of haphazardly folded clothes you have just packed. You sigh deeply and close the lid of the suitcase. Then you suddenly clutch the rounded corners of the closed lid and start to feel a bit dizzy. This really isn’t you, you think to yourself. Being struck with the sudden fear of forgetting something vital, yeah, that is normal. Running off to a train station seeking adventure in New York at 9:30 pm, yeah, that is not normal for you. This really isn’t sensible. What would mom think? 

Your stomach starts wobbling like a washing machine on the spin cycle as you think about cities and all the bustling people and the blaring lights and the noises and the dark allies where you would probably be murdered because you didn’t know to take mugger money with you.

You hate cities. 

You bend your neck to press your forehead into the bare space between your whitening knuckles. The bumpy texture of the purple shell leaves evenly spaced dots across your stretched skin as a desperate squeal slithers from your throat. 

“I really can’t do this,” you say to yourself. 

You shake your head back and forth with your forehead still pressed against your packed bag. This turns your forehead into inverted bubble wrap, but you really don’t care. More pain ridden whines trickle from between your quivering lips. A passerby might have thought you were pleading for your life not an impromptu-to trip to New York. 

“But I already packed,” is the last pitiful sputter of the adventure motivated you who has been spearheading this endeavor. At least you think it is the last attempt till another bust of motivation quakes out from the aching cannon in your heart. You grab the black rubber handle of your suitcase, rise, and stair down the cream colored door to the outside. 

You peer out the window taking up the top half of the heavy door with determination in your eyes. Then you feel queasy again. Your eyes get lost in the thick blackness of night that lays beyond your well lit little house. There is nothing out there but cold emptiness, you think. You would be alone in the dark if you step through that door. That is not what you wanted. 

You let your arms go slack and the suitcase drop to just above the floor. You have finally come to your senses. 

You go back up to your bedroom where you belong. You dump the contents of your bag onto the floor and throw the suitcase into the depth of your closest where you no longer have to lay eyes upon it. That is where that belongs, you think angrily as you shove it in till it is covered in the shadow of your hanging clothes. 

When you turn around you can’t help your need to neatly fold your clothes back into your dresser. One, you need to erase evidence of your “episode.” And two, you just don’t want your clothes laying on the floor. 

After the therapeutic chore of folding your clothes is done, all the turmoil of the evening comes crashing back down on you like shower of rocks. You want nothing more than to avoid getting crushed and bruised by the emotional stoning you feel. So you walk over and flop face down onto your queen sized bed like a flung starfish. You can barely breathe with your nose buried in the seven inches of fluff gently encasing your face. You turn your face sideways to breath in like a whale breaking the surface for air. 

“That is the last time I look at travel websites after 8:00 pm,” you promise yourself. 

You think about how crazy you have been; how stupid you have been. Running off to New York, a city you don’t even care for, may be something people do in books and movies but it really is a stupid and impractical idea. 

You think back to that image of getting murder in a cold dark ally. There are distant and impationate honks and shouts, there are trash cans lining the damp brick walls, and the bright city skyline stretches out beyond your crumpled body in this impossible angle in your imagination. Oddly enough, there isn’t a mugger in that image of a dark smelly city ally. There is just you and all your fear as you bleed out from a knife wound to the stomach. 

“Well, that is silly too," you mumble. "I probably wouldn’t have been mugged or stabbed if I’d gone to New York,” you chastise yourself. 

Then you hide your face back into your sea of fluff and let out a muffled growl. Okay, things aren’t like Hallmark movies and they are not like the die in an ally scenario in your head either! And this thought frustrates you to no end. 

“I have been spending too much time alone. I am beginning to think like two people,” you grumble into your powder pink downy comforter. 

You come up for air again and your eyes widen in fear. You start to agonize over the growing dichotomy in your mind

 There is the normal, if somewhat paranoid, you who always thinks (a little too) sensibly about things. Then there is the desperate inner you who wants to somehow become the person you have always wanted to be and was willing to do almost any crazy thing to do it. Then, occasionally, there is the third you who sometimes mediates between the sensible and the desperate. 

Your teeth clench in concern as you realize that this is two too many people for one head. Then you close your eyes and grimace as you as you try to push all three away wanting only peace and quiet in your head.

You crawl over to the pillow end of your bed and slide in between your down comforter and the cotton sheet covering your memory foam mattress topper. You close your eyes with the light still beaming from the floor lamp in the opposite corner of the room.

You just want to be you. But you don’t know who that is.

You open your eyes and make your best attempt at thinking like you.

Tomorrow you are going to wake up and call some of your friends to plan a real trip to some place you actually want to go-maybe renting a condo or cottage by a lake for a long weekend.

You pull over a corner of your powder pink cover and walk over to your floor lamp. You march like confidence. You give yourself a curt nod as you turn the thin nob to the lamp. You walk back to your bed in darkness but do not stumble because you know where everything is.