In a nearly empty room, she sits silent. Her tiny frame wedged between two boxes, just short enough to rest her elbows on. Looking down at an all too familiar picture of scraped knees sliced by wispy strands of blonde dangling in front of her face, she lets out a tiny puff of air once and then twice, and then giving into apathy as the strands remain, allows her head to drop completely as her eyes slide shut. Black gives way to a miserable array of colors. As each neuseating shade swirls to meet the next, each becomes harder and harder to distinguish and with increasing speed, they’ve unified, and she’s returned to black. But this black is different. No longer is black the nothingness that appears behind eyes in the youth of sleep, black is now a color, thick and brooding, smothering her daytime dreams and suffocating the life of her only escape. With one swift breath, she is brought to her feet once again. She counts under her breath the boxes that remain. Ten. Ten more boxes and a closet full of clothes and this would all be over. With an air of distain, she makes nine trips, up and down three flights of stairs and outside, balancing each box on a bare knee while desperately jiggling a tired key into the trunk of her ’98 Honda Civic, nearly axfixated by mid-July heat. Leaving one last box behind, she begins slinging clothes over her arm. And with metal hangars drawing tiny dots of blood on her forearm, she makes five more trips. She takes on the steps back to her unit, slides her key into the door one last time and takes three steps into her one room studio before collapsing on the floor. Using a final ounce of energy to turn herself over, she stares up at the white stucco ceiling and spreads her arms out perpendicular to her body. She can feel small bits of dust tickling her arms and catching in between strands of her ponytail as beads of sweat drop to meet them. Forcing her eyes open to avoid familiar neusea, she lays waiting for a moment where this would feel natural; when leaving all this behind would begin to feel like a willing change of scenery.

* * *

“There is no shade of blue as bright as the blue in your eyes”. His words had followed her into the airport yesterday. They sat beside her as she pushed half-edible chicken back and forth through watered down gravy. They recited themselves monotonously as she stood, barely awake, listening to the low murmer of the baggage conveyer belt and then down the escalator and outside into the taxi where she sat now, gazing in apprehension out a fingerprinted window at urban fluorescence. She began to question the blue in her eyes as her reflection melded with the city lights. Jet-lag prevailed as the muscles behind her eyes ceased and her vision blurred, smearing multi-colored electric letters and the colors of her face into the most beautiful shade of blue she’d ever seen. She closed one eye and then the other, switching frames between the lights of the city and their reflection in her own tired shade of blue. How foreign it seemed to see her own face reflected beside something so alive.

Her faded map of Chicago showed she was nearly eight blocks away from her hotel, but she demanded they stop despite. Slinging her old basketball duffel bag over her shoulder and balancing it on her back, she maneuvered three large suitcases on the handles of a smaller suitcase on wheels. Bending down and throwing one hand over all three to make sure they didn’t fall, she grasped the handle with her free hand. The one in the middle began to slip and, as she reached for something to catch its fall before creating a scene in the middle of this foreign city, her pinky slid into the loop of a tag tied to the end of the zipper. ‘Jessica Nicole Marshall’. She wiped her thumb across the frosted silver plate with her name engraved. The corners of her mouth slipped as she realized this was the first time she’d ever used this luggage. She’d received when she was five as a gift from her grandfather. A five year old has little use for brown leather luggage and she found a more proper use for it by curling her bony frame around itself and zipping herself inside of it. Her relatives laughed uncontrollably for several minutes before unzipping her, pulling her out and informing her that this was a suitcase to put all of her things in should she ever decide to travel to another place.
“What is travel?” She asked.
“Travel means that you get on a plane or into a car or onto a train and you can go anywhere you want in the whole world, Jessi”.
“Really?? Well then one day, I’m gonna put all my leggos inside this suitcase and I’m gonna zip it up, and I’m gonna get on a train and I’m gonna go over the ocean and I’m gonna play with the sharks in the water and then…and then….and THEN… I’m gonna build castles with the Queen of France!”
Despite snickering from her parents and sister, she proceeded with this dream for several months; performing bows to her mom at various moments throughout the day, rehearsing her etiquette for the Queen of France. She’d become accustomed to curtseying before dinner and drinking juice from a plastic jug with her pinkies raised high:
“This is how the Queen eats her peanut butter and jelly and juice, ya know”.

As she began to grow out of her days of boundless imagination and into the harsh reality of suburban childhood, her restlessness had been replaced with her own sense of comfort. She became safely settled in her ranch style house with a backyard as far as the eye could see. Within a few years, she had forgotten about leggo-building tea parties with the Queen of France and her hand-made Italian leather luggage had settled quite nicely in a far corner of their attic. After college, while most of her close friends were itching to leave their small country town to pursue jobs in big cities all over the country, she desired nothing more than to stay in Missouri with her family, pursue a hometown career, and remain happy, comfortable and settled.


She used the remaining strength she had left after 12 hours of traveling to lift the stiff suitcase back into its place in the strategic stack of her condensed belongings. She walked with her body hunched over towards the glass door and then, stretching her back tall and pushing her shoulders back, she stood in front of it for a moment.
“Chicago Diner: Open 24 Hours”, was lit up over her head in fluorescent pink. She pressed her hip into the glass and maneuvered her way inside, pausing only for a moment to take in the sound as she entered. Her eyes moved upward as she noticed the bell above the door and she felt the muscles in her back release the slightest bit. This was the sound of home. As she felt the door move slowly shut behind her, she took a moment to glance over her shoulder at the foreign sight of blinding light in the middle of the night, swarms of people yelling and laughing in the streets when the world should’ve been asleep and the sound of muffled base bellowing from clubs and bars up and down State street. Snapping her head around to a much more familiar sight in front of her, she was led to her very own stool at the bar by middle-aged woman in a red and white jumper, white reebock’s and a hairnet.