Once, during our honeymoon in Paris, I saw him pack an impossible —because large and achingly detailed— scale model of the Bounty into a suitcase. It reached its destination —not a rope loose or a sail out of place; the ship unmutinied, as it were.
You can take stock of a man by how he packs, I learned. He rotates not just shapes, but textures; iron will, and ironed out. His spatial intelligence is non-pareil.
Everything clicks tonight: pieces of driftwood, silverware, ceramics, a side-set pair of shark jaws held by a hinge of cartilage, as if by a thong; a shadowbox, glazed, thinly framed in finely brushed, almost Phoenician-purple copper; pink quartz bookends; a quiver of porcupine quills; a bronze lamp for my nightstand; remnants of raw ceremonial tobacco; a can of Kopi Luwak that may or may not be stale, though we shall soon find out how civet coffee ages.
The list goes on. To some degree it’s endless: it must be. It caters to the way we live—collecting half-dead things that still retain an aura of exoticism, extinction’s mystique. To a sacrosanct extent, ours is a symbiotic stand-off with everything we love that has allowed our stewardship of it.
He also bought me jewellery today; more of it: amazonite on silver, shaped like flow[er]ing feathers, because I evoke plumes and blooms to him. Clusters of pearls, oceanic and riparian, garnished with semiprecious stones. Those travel on me: I am the carry-on with the long, lacustrine cleavage; the girl with the infinite fingers who can sport a jewel the way he packs a bag.
It is important that I die as precisely as he packs; with nothing left to chance and all the proper structural reinforcements.
Have I cried freely in front of you yet? Would you like me to?
Always pack a pair of scissors and a boxcutter. You never know when they might come in handy.
The first page of Lieutenant William Bligh's list of mutineers on the Bounty, 1789. National Library of Australia.
This is so beautiful. Hope this departure finds you safely to the next destination.