Search the luggage

You get up and pull “your” suitcase down to the floor of the train car with a heavy thunk. There’s a certain exasperation that you feel in your heart as you pop the locks on either side. A feeling that this is some sort of misunderstanding, one that will be sorted out very shortly.

That the satchel you woke up with is not yours, just somebody who looks exactly like you, who has almost but not quite the same name as you, who has the same birthday as you, from some foreign land that you don’t know and certainly have never heard of before. One that just so happens to speak English going by the name of “People’s State of Kansas,” that you had never heard of before in your life. You snort.

“Maybe they’re from some place in Africa,” you chuckle nervously to yourself. Knowing full well that you learned back in elementary school in Kansas, that Kansas, the name, is indigenous to the lands and older then any white man’s name for this land.

The suitcase opens with a creak, and you feel your stomach drop. Gone are your familiar albeit ratty clothes that you remember packing last night. No, now these were all new clothes, one that you had to admit seemed off.

You picked up a t-shirt and could feel how different it was then your old t-shirts. You can feel how much softer the material is, how almost sheer the fabric of the shirt seems to be when you rub it between your fingers. The sensation is somehow familiar and yet unfamiliar to you. As were the designs of the clothes, the collars all wrong, the fabric thinner, the cuts seeming weird and off puttingly effeminate to you. That holding up a shirt shows that it's obviously meant to hug your figure in a way that you’d more expect of athletic wear or something intentionally skimpy, not a simple t-shirt. But you also spy a formal shirt, one that seems to have a massive collar and the top buttons non-functional for some reason, sewn directly into the shirt.

Searching the suitcase further, you find more unfamiliar clothes and personal effects that here and now you must guess are now yours. It is frustrating for you, really, because they almost have your name on them. That they are obviously someone’s, there is a journal with the wrong name and wrong handwriting in it. A little book you did not remember packing with a red cover and gold lettering on it's cover. A truly suspicious number of cartons of cigarette carefully packed along the inside of the suitcase like one would pack a Christmas stocking from brands you have never heard of. Various postcards stuffed here and there with somebody else’s cursive handwriting on them, from locations in Chicago like the 'Palace of Culture and Science', 'Palace of Labor', and 'Palace of the Chambers of Congress,' all pictures of imposing neoclassical skyscrapers you certainly would have remembered seeing in Chicago. A binder full of official looking documents from a university but neither your university nor your program for that matter but still addressed to John Brown. You recognized what these all were, somebody’s personal effects, but they were not yours, were never yours in a way that makes you almost feel sick as well as confused to see your name, your face, your details all over them.