Three Weeks In One Carry-On (Part 1)
What I packed and wore and other things I didn't know was worth writing about
Editor’s Note: By the time I went to make this live, I realized it was way too much to put nine outfits in one single post. So come join me next week when I list the other four. For now, keep reading!
Hi, how are you? I packed a carry-on for Berlin. Oak brought one along, too. I began another letter the same way, but it was a postcard… placing my feet in the sand of time. As our end of August arrival to Brooklyn has now turned into the end of September settling, there’s still a question floating not only in my inbox but in my head and camera roll. Each trip I take a carry on bag. It is all that I can muster. This has extended beyond me to also include the children, as their stuff can easily become my stuff. By the metrics of time and space, at first it was quite simply because I was one adult and there are two of them. But as the years have worn on, I have come to realize it is just who I am. A formula for how I operate. How I navigate my body in space, through borders. By extension, their bodies too.
As they have grown, I noticed, of course, as one does, how this serves them and how it doesn’t. But also, how it may be passed to them as some heirloom. A recipe even. Instead of a fabulous cake, it is the way their mothers knew how to not only pile them on a plane or train for several days and weeks, for hours at hand, but how to pile and style their things, too. My penchant for packing small seems to be in direct contrast with the mass that is my closet, but in reality, if examined closely, both are symptoms of one another. The closet is the same old closet. And as Erika noted, style is not contingent on the freshest pieces of fashion. I’d argue that those who I’ve known in the game long enough hold a sort of reverence for the life the pieces have lived and where they’re going in their own worlds.
I suppose that this is in part why a carry-on has been my mode of travel for all of my adult years. It is also, of course, a reflection of politics around travel to begin with; extending itself far beyond the clothes to pack and wear, and to how we experience a space and when. Routine, for sure. Its simplicity is magnetizing. Comforting. Especially if one calls themselves a single-parent. It is the least disruptive of all the things. When I travel I want to fold into a place as a resident and equally as a witness. Is that possible?
If I am so under the radar, conforming and navigating, then I am able to bear the honor of observing that I not only want to, but am allowed to.
When we returned to Brooklyn in late August, and when I finished recording the book in early September, I noticed that instead of rushing through the threads of my abandoned closet, I had gleaned for the things I had packed, washed, unpacked and left sitting in front of it. As if they offered more than the kaleidoscope of things that I had once-worried would no longer remain in my name on the steel posts in my bedroom-studio. Somehow, the pieces that I carried in the carry-on were more than useful. They remained comfortable. A takeaway to ease. Grace, even. A pathway in the measurable discomfort of returning home, different, albeit and needing to tackle a few big things.
They say that clothes tell a story. Hell, I’ve said that. As the chillier days take hold, I am settling into that, for now, and likely forever, I want to pack light. Be light. Move with less. Be expansive, but with less. Will I listen better because of what I wear? Will I be cleared? More empathetic? Will grace sketch the outlines of where I move from one thing to the next? Here are five outfits I carried for three weeks and a song I kept listening to too…
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