Batered Suitcase

She stood in the warm pool of sunlight; her battered suitcase piled on the side-walk again. She knew she had longer ways to go. Unaccustomed to such calmness, she wanted to delay the other worlds that were waiting.

It had been inconceivable to her that people could destroy each other, over and over again. She wished to offer comfort, to erase the damage. She didn't understand why people were not used to experiencing something without over-thinking the potential consequences it may have. It seemed absurd to her that people should have such skewed perceptions about the things that were most important to them.

She had observed that most people went through phases. Some-days they were the people they were supposed to be; both them and their silhouettes. They hoped that on the days they were only darkened lines, she was still willing to be near them. Even with this thought in mind, they would buy her drinks and then tell her lies. And when all other excuses had been exhausted, they blamed it on the days.

There were slow days and busy days and dull days and hateful days and the rare days �" and they were both long and short at the same time. They ended up flowing into one another and lost their names. Those days were a blur, commutes forgotten over pixel-strings of texts sent describing nothing, days awash in emails containing famous quotes from famous books that were never read and authors whose names were mispronounced. And then those days turned into weeks, and months and years.

They thought she had lost her way but they didn't know that not all those who wander were lost. It comforted her, in a strange way, to travel from the hills to the desert and meet all these people who were all so alike and so different. They were all alone. They made futile attempts to be sincere. To be there for someone else. They made promises that the other person wouldn't be alone. This was friendship. This was love. This was humans at their best and worst.

Nothing was simple, little was whole. They were part technology, part broken family, part digital, part unknowable and in-capable of belief in mystery.
But then there were some people that made her reconsider.
They told her to not lose hope �" that what she seeked would be found. They trusted ghosts. They trusted dreams. They trusted their heart, and they trusted their story. They were so blissfully unaware of the demons that they were still capable of finding joy in the smell of pages that had become brown with age.
So she picked up the suitcase again, and walked on. She had longer ways to go.