I have a suitcase that I never fully unpack. It sits on the floor of wherever I am living at the time, open, with clothes still folded inside. I don't know when this became a habit.
I think it started the first year I moved here, when everything still felt temporary, and I just never stopped.
People come over and ask if I just got back from a trip and I say yes because it's easier than explaining that I have lived here for years and the suitcase just stays like that.
Half unpacked. Lid open. Sitting in the corner of the room. I don't know why I'm telling you this.
I pretty much came to this country alone. Everyone else, it seemed, had come with their people already formed, their circles already closed, laughing in a language of inside jokes I would never be taught.
I learned to walk into rooms with a smile and a voice that sounds like it belongs there, because if you do it well enough, no one checks.
I don't prefer it.
There was this person I cared very much about. Thought we were speaking the same language. Thought the walls between us were thin enough to hear through. But love, when it is not met in the way it is given, does not just disappear. It floods.
It filled every room I had built until the floors gave out, and the people around me, the ones I thought were permanent, looked at the mess and decided it was easier to leave than to stay and get wet. One by one they walked out.
It broke something in the way I attach to people. Like a bone that heals slightly wrong and never quite moves the same again. I recovered, eventually, the way you recover from anything if you give it enough silence and enough time.
I filled the space with work, with motion, with small accomplishments I could stack in front of me like proof that I was still a functioning person. And I was. I am.
New people showed up over the years. Good people. People who tried to sit next to me and stay. And I let them, sort of, in the way that you let someone into your living room but never show them the bedroom. I laughed with them. I was present.
But I kept the realest parts of myself in a room they didn't have access to, and I told myself it was protection when really it was fear wearing a more acceptable name. If I don't let you see me, you can't decide I am too much.
If I keep the door half open, I can pretend you chose to stay when really you just never saw enough to leave.
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever let someone see the full version of me. If there is a person out there who could hold the thing I carry without flinching. Sometimes I wonder if I even remember how to show it. You keep something hidden long enough and it starts to feel like it was never yours to begin with.
Maybe one day it will make sense. Maybe the loneliness has been building towards something I can't see yet.
Maybe there is someone out there who speaks the same quiet language and is just as afraid of saying it first.
Maybe I have been packing light my whole life because the right place to stay hasn't shown up yet.
Or maybe I just need to unpack anyway. Even if I'm not sure. Even if it terrifies me. Even if I have no proof that the ground beneath me will hold.
The suitcase is still open. But I think I'm getting tired of living out of it.