Suitcase full of dears
Sitting on my desk, amid the coffee mugs, soy packets and stacks of business cards I’ve no one to give to, sits a suitcase. It’s old and battered, and try as hard as I might, I just can’t seem to rid myself of it.
Stuck to the inside of the suitcase is an ID tag that reads, “drayage.” Drayage means “conveyance by dray.” It’s safe to say that nowadays, nobody drays anything.
I love old suitcases, and as interesting as they can be what I find most interesting is what’s inside. And what’s inside this one is over a hundred envelopes containing handwritten letters, photographs and souvenirs. Taken as a whole, the correspondence charts the half decade relationship between a young man named Brad and a young woman named Isabel.
The suitcase was left for garbage on a street corner in Brooklyn in 1990 and has since been passed around, like a foundling, from caretaker to caretaker who can’t bring themselves to toss it, for almost two decades. It ultimately found its way into the hands of a woman named Kendra. But she’s now moving in with her boyfriend to begin a new relationship, and the idea of showing up clutching a suitcase containing a dead relationship feels inauspicious.
Kendra wants to finally get the suitcase back to the original letter writers and reached out to me, through my podcast, to help. She wants to bequeath the suitcase to me, but as someone with his own baggage, and plenty of it, I’m not looking to take on someone else’s. But Kendra sensed in me a kindred spirit. We’re both the kind of people who want to see meaning and beauty lurking in the shadows of the past. In a word, Kendra saw in me a fellow garbage-picker.
None of us will probably ever again have a collection of a hundred handwritten letters mailed to us with photographs developed by an enlarger in a dark room. One day when drones and satellites are capturing our every moment, when each of our collected correspondence is housed in an ever-expanding cloud, there may not be a need for such suitcases at all.
But until that time, there is. The suitcase sits on my desk making me feel guilty, like the way I feel when my inbox is full and I have email to send. I unsnap the suitcase, start rummaging for clues and like any man stuck somewhere between the past and the future, I start Googling.