All In A Box - Noaa Rienecker
She threw some out
and packed some up
and blew rent shipping it back,
leaving each hand weighted with a suitcase -
one for standard travelling effects,
the other for an incalculably precious cargo.
In that precious case
were many documents,
notarizing her existence
and permitting movement
and ownership within it,
describing, in a gradually more refined scrawl,
her life in various stages, first person;
attempts to approach and sort out feelings,
accounts of dreams, notable events
and editorializations thereof,
and her parents’ last will and testament.
It contained stories by a nine year old girl
about the nine year old girl
and stories by a twenty-three year old woman
about the twenty-three year old woman,
which felt, in a way, like they were still
stories about the nine year old girl,
as if they were the same person.
She placed it in the back of her truck
after the flight,
drove to Oakland,
parked on Telegraph Avenue,
and walked to dinner with friends.
There is a thing that happens
in Oakland
when you park your truck on
Telegraph and leave
precious things in the back
and go to dinner,
and it did,
So upon returning
to the vehicle
she found she
had nothing to show
for herself.
No stories.
No proof.
No pictures.
No editorials.
No artifacts.
Not even the title
to the ransacked truck.
She felt sick and cold
and did not sleep that night.
The impending bureaucratic shitshow was not important
when compared to the amputation
of physical things, precious things,
imbued with ephemeral stories,
her stories, from her hands,
reassuring themselves.
She felt sick
and she felt cold
and she felt like
no one with nothing
and she did not sleep
and the dawn came.
The sun
was the same,
in a relative way,
and she was still there,
in a relative way,
but older.
Nothing was different, really,
in that nothing is ever the same.
She went out for bagels
with a friend
and on the way back,
encountered a shabby man
lumbering down the sidewalk
with one of those physics-defying
shopping cart rigs piled high with
costco bags and toilet paper and plastic
and a bright bouquet of fake flowers at the fore
tied securely to a dowel - the masthead -
and a little suitcase that made her heart jump.
He was reasonable when confronted,
(it was clearly not he who had raided
the bed of her truck),
and stood by, wearing her favorite shirt,
while she sifted through
the strewn contents of the case,
now distributed throughout his unsightly vessel.
She found clothes,
a toothbrush,
a pair of sandals,
a comb,
a book,
some hair ties,
a bag of peanuts,
and a bottle of dramamine
and was delighted.