Although my parents were back from their trip, and my phone had been blowing up with messages from the temp agency, I couldn’t seem to tear myself away from the suitcase. The idea of time traveling again was just too intoxicating. And I wanted answers!
I continued my deep dive into the theories behind time travel, taking copious notes and trying to make my best guesses about what might apply to my magical time traveling suitcase. I wanted to figure out as much as I could before I went on another adventure.
I was burning the candle at both ends and it began to catch up with me. One night, I was so tired that I fell into a deep sleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. I dreamed I was back in my grandmother’s 1950’s kitchen. We were baking cookies and I felt intensely sentimental as we worked, appreciating every little thing about the kitchen, my grandmother’s clothes, and the tools we were using. Once our dough was ready, Grandma said, “It’s time to put the cookies in the oven!” But instead of putting them in the oven, she put them inside the suitcase, which had magically appeared in the kitchen. Then she turned to me and booped my nose saying, “The secret ingredient is love!”
I protested, and tried to tell my grandmother that the suitcase wouldn’t work.
“Oh, you silly girl,” my grandmother said. “ You’ve been using your head so long that you’ve forgotten how to follow your heart.”
She winked at me and opened the suitcase again, pulling a platter of perfectly baked cookies from it. I felt warm, and fuzzy, and intensely happy, the intoxicating aroma of the freshly baked cookies wrapping me in a warm hug. My grandmother handed me a cookie and took one herself. Then she said, “When I make these cookies, I close my eyes and can almost believe that I’m back in my grandmother’s kitchen baking with her.” As she said this, she closed her eyes, a wistful smile on her face.
But as I watched her, she faded away, taking the cookies with her, leaving me alone in the kitchen with the suitcase. Suddenly, the kitchen began rumbling and the countertops seemed to grow beside me as I felt my body shrinking until I was no larger than a mouse. I panicked and began racing around the kitchen, the terrazzo floor now acting as a treadmill. It suddenly pitched to one side and my tiny legs couldn’t keep up with the moving floor beneath my feet. I began to slide backwards where the suitcase waited, towering over me, it’s clasps undone with either side forming a great mouth that was flapping and chomping. I tried to run away from it but I wasn’t fast enough. The suitcase caught me in its mouth, swallowed me whole, and everything went dark.
It was quiet inside the suitcase. It felt safe and cozy in the darkness. Even though I couldn’t see anything, I had the same sentimental feeling I’d initially had in my grandmother’s kitchen. There was a vague aroma of peaches, cinnamon, and bread cooking. A dim light began to glow off in the distance and from the glow I heard a muffled and faraway voice that sounded an awful lot like my grandmother’s. “Which way would you like to go?”
“I don’t understand!” I called into the darkness.
“You must choose.” said the voice.
Distressed, I replied, “I don’t know how!”
“Follow your heart,” whispered the voice. “It will show you the way.”
The voice was a constant whirring thrum reverberating in my brain. I tried to move toward the vibration, but my legs seemed frozen and the more I tried to move, the more impossible it seemed. I felt panic rising in my chest, and I suddenly awoke with a start.
Still in that moment between being asleep and being awake, I relaxed back into bed and allowed my eyes to close softly, but they shot back open when I realized that the noise from my dream had followed me. The noise I’d been walking toward in my dream had been real. It was the humming of the suitcase.
