I pushed my insides outside living here for far too long.

Everybody has a bag. It's everything you need for your day, for a night, a week, an indefinite period of time, forever, enough space to add in all the things you pick up on the way. It has no size, no volume, just a random decision making process so that what should be carefully chosen is stacked up with everything else, that sits in order for the fewest creases. Nobody is exempt, because even not caring is a point of view. Shoes at the bottom, socks and secrets bundled up and shoved into the toes, sitting heel to toe so as not to scuff together, making sure that the new roads have confusing messages about what to learn from the older ones. Then the bulkier items that sit to the bottom, that sink to the bottom - jeans and sweat pants, the issues you got from your family, and the names of every person who ever broke your heart. That time you had a breakdown in the street. The bar on East 5th that you only know you were in by the hangover sticking around three days later. Shirts line the top, tucked in with the stories of what happened when you were at primary school, and the casual Chardonnay and dinner party issues that look even better at 2am underneath a neon light. Ribbons of film reel, quotes and song lyrics wind around the collars and cuffs, promising revelations later, but only once everything else has been unpacked. Underwear carries its own secrets, tucked along the side, the mouthwatering bruises buried in the black lace, and the stupid life choices slipped between satin.

When I was eight, I had a recurring dream that happened two, three times a month. Filled with tigers and the threat of evisceration, I couldn't stop what was happening and every time I'd get a little further into the jungle, just a little closer to dying. I read page after page of books, keeping myself awake and away from the world of claws and savagery, decoding past, present and imagination to see if there was some kind of message and getting nowhere. It took years until I realized that the tigers couldn't hurt me, and in dreams I couldn't die. One night, I learned to ride the tiger as though it was a horse, keeping hold of fistfuls of fur and trying desperately to keep my balance. I didn't fall off and until the moment I woke up, I was filled with the most euphoric sense of freedom. I never had the dream again. This is what my brain adopted as a process - finding a challenge and working out a way to let it cripple me until the arbitrary day that decided I could win, trading in books on dream analysis for poetry collections and friends with limitless patience. Cashing in the tigers of my dreams for wolves that howled at the door. Leaving anyway.

In the nights that came later, that I never told you who I was in the moment, only the few people that I'd been before. The ones that wouldn't cramp the space where where we weren't hungry but still just sweet. My head finding a place to rest against the fine bones of your wrist, your watch ticking, near-silent but precise; a metaphor in the making. The bag, sitting in the corner, full of stories of people I never gave you the chance to know, instead presenting it as a collective Past over which you'd triumphed. In spite of that, the bag still swollen with secrets, ready to betray like an overripe fruit falling out of the bowl. I wake up to the sweet smell of fermentation and rot, and sometimes you caught sight of my face in a mirror and we both understood that you'd never know what you were looking at.

Because I've always needed people the way that a junkie needs a fix, the same amount of fear and trembling, and it's painful, and exhausting, and exhilarating. But at the end you'll wish you hadn't, and I tell you that the day that I realize I'm picking up a darklight frequency that I could lose my mind over. The day that I realize I've already started to feel the pull of the undertow, and the thing about revelations is that they're a shining moment of revelation in a sea of darkness, and they change nothing. It's a way to let yourself off the hook from having to do anything more painful, like believing yourself, or giving other people something to believe in. Still, I want the truth not to be a hand grenade in a crowded room, or an AK-47 at a wedding shower, and part of that comes from knowing how to speak it. Retraining my mouth, because the thing about selective honesty is that it's the biggest lie of all. So I give you the full story, and I let you make your own mind up. It's starting to be terrifying, but it's a more powerful shot of something than anything I've done before.

I pack a bag in the dark the day I leave, so that not even I know what's inside it. It turns out I fill it with nothing that I need and everything that I am. I don't mean to set trip wires, when the past present future sit and wait until everything ends up being a question of now. I don't open the bag so much as kick it over, throwing everything in the air and letting it fall when it will. The conversations are had, and the options are to stay or go. You pick up the bag, and what happens next is up to you. The bag is just a bag. It means as much as you want it to, but there's nothing in it that's worth as much as the feeling of being here.