Packed for Departure

“Folding someone’s clothes into a suitcase feels harmless—until you realise you’re also folding away the life you once shared with them.”

I wrapped my fingers tightly around the black handle of Paul's travel bag, dragging it across the carpet with a dull scrape.

It had been left near the door earlier in the day, an afterthought then, but now it carried a different weight. Each thud as it bumped along the hallway felt like punctuation, reminding me of the growing list of things we would need to survive between worlds. The bag itself was unremarkable—black nylon, scuffed at the corners, the kind of thing you'd grab for a weekend away without thinking twice. Now it was a lifeline, a vessel carrying fragments of my brother's existence into a dimension that shouldn't exist.

"I guess I'd better pack Jamie a suitcase too," I muttered softly to myself.

The thought surfaced as though it had only just occurred, though part of me suspected it had been waiting there all along, crouched in some quiet corner of my mind. A man like me didn't leave contingencies untouched for long. The planner in me had already run through the inventory of what Jamie would need—clothes, toiletries, the small comforts that might make imprisonment in another world slightly more bearable.

I crossed into the bedroom, scanning the familiar lines of the built-in wardrobe.

Its doors opened with a faint shudder, releasing a breath of lavender and cedarwood sachets Jamie had insisted on. The scent hit me with unexpected force, carrying memories of mornings waking beside him, of his hands smoothing shirts onto hangers, of the thousand unremarkable moments that had somehow become the architecture of our years together.

My eyes tracked upward to the top shelf, where the largest suitcase lay in its usual place, untouched for months. The last time we'd used it had been for that trip to Melbourne—the wine tour, the long dinners, the hotel room with the view of the Yarra. That version of us felt impossibly distant now, separated not just by time but by something far stranger.

Retrieving it required a stretch and awkward pull, but when I finally dragged it down and let it drop onto the bed, it landed with a soft thud that seemed heavier than its emptiness should allow.

Thrown open, it gaped at me, cavernous and expectant, its interior a hollow space ready to be filled with fragments of Jamie's life. Shirts, shoes, memories—pieces of him transported into Clivilius one careful fold at a time.

The sight pulled at me, a mingling of practicality and quiet dread. To pack for someone else was to take ownership of choices they hadn't made yet. To decide what they would wear, what they would need, what version of themselves they would carry into an uncertain future. There was something intimate about it—and something deeply unsettling.

The scrape of claws broke the thought.

Duke's nose appeared at the edge of the mattress, curiosity shining in his eyes, the tilt of his head as comical as it was poignant. He lifted himself slightly, intent on clambering inside the empty case as though it were a den made just for him.

My heart sank a little at the innocence of it.

"Duke, don't. Oh for God's sake, get out!"

The admonishment spilled out, weary but softened by the affection that threaded every word. I waved a hand half-heartedly, knowing full well that scolding him was as futile as telling rain to fall upwards. His presence was both irritation and comfort, a reminder of loyalty so absolute it bordered on the sacred.

Still, as I bent to lift him down, a colder thought pressed in beneath the warmth.

Everything I packed, every item I chose to take or leave, was another thread woven into the future I was quietly steering. Jamie and Paul would see clothes and shoes and familiar objects. I would see tools—pieces on a board, reminders of who owed what, who would follow where, and how tightly I could keep it all bound together.

The Machiavellian corner of my mind whispered its appreciation. The rest of me—the part that still remembered what it felt like to love without calculating—recoiled from the whisper.

Each item I folded and placed into the suitcase felt weighted with more than fabric and thread.

Jamie's sneakers went first—worn at the heels, faint traces of blackened dirt caught in the treads from walks we'd taken together. Sunday mornings around the block. That hike up Mount Wellington when we'd argued about nothing and made up before reaching the summit. The shoes held those memories in their scuffed leather, in the particular way the laces had been knotted and left.

Then the shirts, soft cotton smelling faintly of him, layered one over the other as if I could preserve his presence by pressing it down between folds. The blue one he'd worn last Tuesday. The grey henley that made his eyes look silver in certain light. Each one carried its own ghost of a moment, its own echo of a touch or a glance.

Shorts, trousers, a warm jumper—all practical choices, all necessary. Yet each one landed with a heaviness that was more than cloth.

The essentials came last: socks, undies, the small unspoken intimacies of a life lived side by side. One by one, they transformed the yawning emptiness of the suitcase into a portrait of him—Jamie, pieced together through objects, stripped from drawers and shelves as though I were disassembling the very texture of our shared days.

There was something almost surgical about it. Something that felt like preparation for a death, even though he was very much alive—just unreachable, trapped in a world I had opened and then closed behind him.

Duke hovered, nose pressed insistently into the fabric as if scent could reveal the secrets I was keeping.

His sniffing was restless, almost anxious, as though he knew something in his world was shifting, even if he couldn't name it. I watched him for a moment, the furrow in his brow so human it made my chest ache. Dogs understood absence. They understood waiting. They understood the particular shape of a person's footsteps and the particular weight of a person's silence when they didn't return.

What they couldn't understand was why.

The guilt sharpened then, sudden and unrelenting.

Packing Jamie's belongings wasn't just practicality—it was confession. The act of lifting his life from these walls, placing it into a case meant for another world, underscored the truth I'd been circling: this house, these rooms, this chapter—it was already ending.

The sting of it caught me off guard, as if by folding Jamie's clothes I had folded closed the comfort of our ordinary life. All those years of building something together—the furniture we'd chosen, the arguments we'd had, the silences we'd learned to share—condensed now into a suitcase that would travel through a wall of light and land in dust.

"I'm sorry, Duke," I told him softly, scratching behind his ears as I wiped away a tear with my free hand.

His fur was warm, grounding, alive in a way the suitcase would never be.

"I know you're going to miss him."

The words tasted strange in my mouth—apology and acknowledgement wrapped together, though who I was apologising for remained uncertain. Jamie, for being taken? Duke, for being left? Or myself, for being the one who had set all of this in motion?

Duke tilted his head, watching me with those dark, liquid eyes that seemed to hold questions he couldn't ask. I wondered what he made of all this—the strange comings and goings, the bags appearing and disappearing, the absence of the man who usually shared our bed. Dogs were supposed to live in the present, but Duke had always seemed to carry something older in his gaze. Something that understood loss even before it arrived.

At last I drew the lid down, its weight muffled as it fell against the pile inside.

My palms lingered on the surface for a moment, pressing into the canvas as though to seal the emotion beneath. With a measured tug, I pulled the zipper across, the metallic rasp slicing through the silence until it clicked closed.

Job done.

A simple phrase, but it echoed like finality.

The study door clicked softly behind me, sealing off the house and, more importantly, keeping Duke from padding after me with those questioning eyes.

The sound carried a finality that prickled across my skin, as though I'd shut more than just a door—I'd closed Duke out of a truth he could never be made to understand. He would wait by the window, or sprawl on the couch with Henri, and he would wonder in whatever way dogs wondered why his world kept rearranging itself while he stayed in the same place.

The room stilled around me, the hum of ordinary life muffled into irrelevance.

I set the bags down at my feet, flexing my fingers once, twice, before reaching for the Portal Key. The air responded before I'd even completed the motion, alive with that familiar tension, a vibration that prickled at the edge of thought.

Then it came.

Light unfurling in ripples, colours blooming from nothing into a living canvas. The dance of it was hypnotic, as it always was: strands of violet bleeding into gold, scarlet ribbons curling like smoke into the deeper hues, all folding into one another with an elegance beyond anything I'd ever seen on Earth.

I found myself staring, pulse slowing, as if the spectacle could momentarily wash clean the clutter of lies and half-truths waiting in my chest.

This gateway, once a phenomenon too vast for me to grasp, had already begun to feel like a fixture of my days. Almost domestic in its repetition—open the Portal, carry supplies, close the Portal, repeat. And yet it had not lost its power to awe. No matter how many times I stood before it, the sight reminded me I was standing on the lip of a reality no one else had mapped, holding tools that could reshape everything if I dared.

"You've got this, Luke," I whispered to myself.

The words felt strange aloud, a private mantra turned into sound, a thread of courage I spun for my own ears. I let them linger, absorbing their resonance, using them like armour against the doubt that never quite retreated.

With a breath drawn deep into my chest, I tightened my grip on the handles.

The bags dragged slightly behind me, their weight a tugging reminder of the lives I was ferrying across this divide. Paul's weekend bag. Jamie's suitcase full of carefully folded clothes. Two men's worth of belonging, packed into luggage and carried through a wall of light into a world that had no right to exist.

Then, with a step both cautious and inevitable, I crossed into the living light, surrendering myself once more to the frontier that was fast becoming home.