Between a Life and a Suitcase

The summer of 1995 began with a single suitcase.

A brown suitcase covered with worn-out stickers from New York, Paris, and Barcelona.

Cities I had never seen. Cities people travel to because they want to. That morning, we were traveling because we had to.

My entire life fit inside that suitcase—everything I had been and everything I was about to lose. And we were only a small dot in a column of two hundred thousand people fleeing their own lives.

Croatia. A beautiful country. The sea sparkling like broken glass in the sun, mountains smelling of pine, villages where people once sat outside their homes drinking coffee together.

And then the war came. War doesn’t change the land. It changes people.

Fear slowly begins to divide the world into two sides—ours and theirs. Borders are no longer drawn only on maps but also inside people’s heads. Neighbors who once borrowed sugar from each other begin looking at each other like enemies.

War is a strange disease. It slips into people’s voices, into their eyes, and into the way they pronounce someone’s name. And one day, you realize something terrifying. You are no longer living among neighbors. You are living among people who have forgotten who they were before fear.

War does not only take homes. It erases the lives that once existed inside them. Before the war, people had names, jobs, plans. They were teachers, bus drivers, shopkeepers, and mothers calling their children home when the streetlights came on.

Then war arrives.

And suddenly you are none of those things anymore. You become a refugee. A word large enough to swallow an entire life. Inside that word, there is no room for your bedroom, no street you walked every day, and no tree you sat beneath in the summer. Everything disappears.

All that remains is one word.

Refugee.

And one suitcase.

No one told us that morning that we would leave our home. The war had already lasted for years, and people had somehow learned to live between shelling and news reports. We thought that day would be like the others. Another day of waiting. Another day of hope.

I was standing in the kitchen when the door burst open. I don’t remember who said the words. I only remember how they sounded. Short. Hard.

We have to go. Not tomorrow. Not in an hour. Now. The world doesn’t collapse suddenly in moments like that. It collapses slowly.

First, you feel an emptiness in your stomach. Your eyes begin wandering across the things around you. The table. The chair. The walls. As if your mind is trying to memorize every detail before it disappears.

I look at the cup I drank coffee from that morning. It’s still warm. I look through the window.

The yard looks exactly the same as yesterday. And something cuts through me. Maybe I am seeing all of this for the last time.

I walk upstairs to my room. When I open the door, everything looks exactly the same. Books I planned to read that summer sit neatly on the shelf. Posters cover the walls. Small objects I have collected over the years lie scattered across my desk. A bracelet from the market. A tiny glass bottle filled with seashells. Pens I never wanted to throw away simply because they looked beautiful. All those small, meaningless things that matter only to teenagers.

I open a drawer. Take out a book. Put it back. I pick up a photograph. Place it on the table again. My mind is trying to choose something that could represent my entire life. But how do you choose? How do you pack childhood? Pack a room? How do you pack yourself? In the end, I simply stand in the middle of the room. Looking around.

I close the drawer. My room stays behind me in terrible disorder. And I leave with almost nothing. Somehow, six of us managed to squeeze into a Renault 4. Inside the small car are two six-month-old babies. No one says the word "forever." Instead, we repeat the same lie.

“We’ll come back when this is over.”

So we take only what we absolutely need. A few diapers. Milk for the babies. And somehow one hundred grams of salami and half a loaf of bread. In the trunk, next to the spare tire, sits the suitcase. The brown suitcase with stickers from New York, Paris, and Barcelona.

Inside it there is almost nothing.

A photograph of my sister and me. And the X-rays of my hips from surgeries only months earlier. There were hardly any belongings inside. And yet my entire life was there. That photograph was proof that I had once existed.

When we reach the road, I realize we are not alone. Columns stretch for miles. Tractors. Cars.

Trucks. People walking. Two hundred thousand people. Two hundred thousand lives packed into bags and suitcases.

Soldiers shout, "Move!" Move! Move!

And we move. For a moment, I think I’ve gone deaf. I see people talking. Children crying. But I hear nothing. Only silence.

But the sound returns. And the first sound I hear is one I will never forget. The roar of airplanes. A deep mechanical sound was tearing through the sky above us. The bombs begin to fall. In that moment, I understand something terrible.

We are no longer a column of people.

We are a moving target made of two hundred thousand lives.

At one point, the column stops. A woman stands by the side of the road. In one hand, she holds a plastic water bottle. In the other, a child’s shirt. She pours a few drops onto a small stain and rubs it gently with her fingers. She doesn’t wash the whole shirt. Only that one stain. As if the child might soon put it on and go to school.

A little further away, an elderly couple stands beside a metal cup. They are selling milk. One cup. Thirty euros. War changes the value of things. Houses become worthless. And a cup of milk becomes a treasure.

Further ahead, the column stops again. A dog stands in the middle of the road. Thin. Covered in dust. He doesn’t bark. Just stands there. Watching the endless line of people. As if waiting for someone. But no one comes.

In the rearview mirror, I still see him standing there. Alone. And for the first time, a thought frightens me. Maybe we look the same to someone else. Like dogs left behind on the road.

The suitcase in the trunk hits the metal frame again. A dull sound. Every time the car bumps over a hole in the road. A reminder that my entire life fits in something small enough to sit beside a spare tire.

The suitcase survived the journey.

It continued its quiet existence with us in Belgrade while we slowly tried to gather the scattered pieces of ourselves and build some kind of life. For years, it stood in a corner. Almost forgotten. But never completely.

Eventually, I brought that same suitcase with me to Ireland. To build a life again. Not because Ireland is home. But because I simply cannot anymore. Because home is no longer a place I can return to. And the country that once was mine no longer wants me.

So I took that same brown suitcase again. And packed another life into it. That morning in 1995, I thought I was packing only a few things. I didn’t know I was packing my entire life.

And that I would never unpack it again in a place I could call home.