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.