There is a tiny room in my house that is dedicated entirely to suitcases.
I don’t pay much attention to it on a regular day when I’m at home and the purpose that room serves becomes solely utilitarian – a nook that I only think of in terms of how convenient it is for the extra storage space it provides. But when I’m away from home, staring up at the two suitcases that I’ve stacked one on top of the other atop the trusty steel wardrobe in my dorm room at university, I can’t help but think about the room that I usually don’t spare a second thought towards. If I stare hard enough, I find my mind conjuring the memory of the day, so many months ago, that I was at the store with my mother, scouring the shelves for a pair of suitcases that I would compress my whole life into in a few days’ time. What does it mean that I can pile my suitcases onto one singular surface when I’m at university but that there’s an entire room devoted to the same purpose back at home?
I’m a younger sibling. Hand-me-downs are all I’ve known for much of my life. Suffice to say, there’s something foreboding lurking within the implication of my suitcases – of all the things that I own – not being hand-me-downs. What did it mean that I couldn’t use the suitcases bought at the time of my sister’s transition from school to university for my own turn at the same transition, even though she was at the cusp of completing her undergraduate degree? It meant that she was going to be using those suitcases again, because she’d soon be relocating and building her life up from scratch but in a different part of the country this time. It meant that I had to buy suitcases of my own so that I could do the very same thing, and that I wouldn’t be able to lend those newfangled suitcases to anyone either, because I’d always need them, poised at the ready to condense my life into at a moment’s notice. Our growing collection of suitcases was writing a story in real-time, a story fraught with new beginnings, painful transitions and, at the heart of it all, the oxymoron that goes something like this: change is the only constant.
It’s not entirely bittersweet, though. A myriad of suitcases can mean something beautiful, too. It can mean you’ve travelled the world, that there was so much to see and so much to remember everything you’d seen by that you needed a place to put all of it. But it doesn’t necessarily that mean everywhere you’ve gone, you’ve gone together. It can signify a family fractured by distance – fractures that only begin to mend for those precious occasions – few and far between as they are – when all the suitcases converge in one room, only for the wound to reopen when everyone goes their own ways and the assortment begins to dwindle.
Essentially, what I’ve embarked on this discursive tangent to say is this: if you see a family with a congregation of suitcases, know that while they may have seen more of the world than most, chances are that they have experienced the pain of separation time & time again. Their suitcases are storybooks that tell tales of growth, of transition, of being tethered and untethered, of roots both planted and upended, of separation and togetherness on the two plates of a weighing scale, suspended in a state of eternal balance. All of you have to do is listen, and the stories will make themselves heard.