Omnia Mea Mecum Porto

Sweltering heat, we had to get out. As we turned down first avenue, a young homeless man walked ahead of us, tugging his belongings in a shopping cart behind him with a leather strap. His boots, his jacket, a tangerine, a crumpled oreo package. I pushed the stroller slowly along behind him, crossing 61st, 62nd, 63rd, his tan muscles flexing with the effort of navigating his shell along the sidewalks. As he drank his bottled water, I reflected how proper he was, with his neatly shaven skin and glossy curls atop his head. His back so straight; when did I walk with such proud strides last?

On my trip to my parents', I unearthed a few boxes in the garage that I had packed a year ago, when my entire life was either sent to storage or forced to fit into airline weight limits. Here was a picture frame, an old record cover, a metal Coffee sign that I bought in Natchez, Mississippi near the restaurant where they flipped your corn bread for you. Here were reminders that I had a life in a whole other world, a life that I loved and had painstakingly been building for so many years.

It took me years to put together that life, to gather bits and pieces of foundations that would anchor me to a city, a country, a person I hoped to find I could be. It took all those years, all those pieces, to realize that who we are cannot be taken away from us, cannot be lost in the move. Years to learn that the people we love are with us to the ends of the earth, because they are the foundations we built within ourselves. I left behind the couch that my parents bought with their first proper money and that I loved so much, the bookshelf my great-grandfather sent to my grandfather when he was away at college, the orange lamp I discovered in my ex-girlfriend's mother's barn. I boarded that airplane, and I brought with me the person those things had made me.

All my things I carry with me.
I am never homeless, thus.