My empty suitcase is for you and is all that I have
Many come now, in a rush. The village expands to make space, we have to hold onto their hands to get them from the misted areas of the border down to the building. The air is mild, but we hand out blankets without speaking. It will take many days for some of them to speak. Some of them have only a vague form. Some have hearts full, miraculously full, and their heads are full of memories that cannot be real.
I was a babysitter, one will say, I wore a white tracksuit. I travelled by bus. I was in love with at least four beautiful people. I had a lottery ticket. None of it can be true. We do not bring those things here, those real memories, but ideas of them persist. Some part of us says there must have been something I was doing - ah yes! But we are unreliable in the extreme.
Those of us who have been here a while know that It does no good to contradict these memories.
I was just mowing the lawn. I had my hand stuck in a hospital vending machine. Maybe, after a long time here, you can find a seed, a grain of something true that you once felt, but it takes many years. It will be a fragment of a corner you once occupied. It will be a string pulled tight like astonishment that has long passed.
When I get down to the registration centre, I have with me my brown suitcase. I go from face to face, if anyone looks at the suitcase, I pretend it is full of an imperceptible gas.
My suitcase appears to rise into the air. I appear to be unable to hold it down. Sometimes it makes someone smile.
At the end of a long day, I go home and open my suitcase on the floor of the kitchen area of my dwelling. There is nothing in the suitcase, of course. It contains the space where an ocean could be, an emptiness I remember swallowing whole. I carefully remember the feeling of being so hollow I seemed to echo. I carefully remember trying to lie down, and being too ashamed even for that.
At night, we sing together, everyone in the village, a song to guide anyone who is lost to this place, and to console them for the small offering of home that they will find here. It will not be what you had before. Our song is met sometimes with sounds from the mist itself, a human roaring, but neither voice can reach the other in harmony.
Our song is made of shadows only, a voice made of space, we sing as loud as we can though it can never be enough, and how quiet we are, and how very sorry.
