The Suitcase Room

Lyrics

Up from the Second Floor, past where the good linen sleeps.
I take the back way, always. The Servant's Stair Landing knows my weight.
To the left, the Portrait Hall is watching, but I don't look back at the painted faces.
I turn away from the long corridor, from the closed door of the Sick Room.
No fevers to tend today. Only dust.
The air thins as I climb, gets warmer. The smell of old wood and kept things.

The Attic Landing is a kind of shore. A place to breathe before you go under.
So many doors up here. The Letter Room holds its paper ghosts.
No need for that. The silence here is heavier.
This one. The plain one. No name on the door, just a keyhole dark as a well.

And here it is. The city of departures.
The Suitcase Room, stacked to the rafters in leather and brass.
Every handle remembers a hand.
Every label a promise made to a map.
This is the archive of the elsewhere. The weight of every goodbye, catalogued and still.

The big steamer trunk for the crossing in 1922, its side still dented from the docks.
The wicker hamper from that one picnic, I can still smell the crushed mint on the drive home.
They are stacked like tenements, with aisles only a child could navigate.
Paris, Cairo, Grand Hotel.
The names are curled and brown, but the ink holds.
This one, the small vinyl one, was for her college that she never finished.
This one held his uniform, packed with my own hands.
I remember remembering the fold in the sleeve.

I run a finger over a scuffed corner, trace a monogram worn smooth.
My thumb finds the cold brass of a lock.
And the room fills with the sound of a train whistle, long and sharp.
The dust motes dance in the light from the high window, each one a tiny, floating world.
Look closely at the label for Rome, and the Colosseum is there, small as a child's thumbnail, perfectly silent inside the paper.

This is the city of departures.
The Suitcase Room, stacked to the rafters in leather and brass.
Every handle remembers a hand.
Every label a promise made to a map.
This is the archive of the elsewhere. The weight of every goodbye, catalogued and still.

They brought the world home in these boxes.
And I was the one who unpacked the sand, the salt, the foreign soil.
I leave them to their long sleep. To their silent journeys.