Shoes here, shirts rolled along the top, jeans and pants flat in the bottom. Vanity bag there. There's a ritual about packing when you've been using the same suitcase for twenty years, a mechanical, half-brain sort of motion that leaves your brain free to obsess about what you're leaving behind.
Her suitcase was a navy blue Samsonite, a going away gift of sorts for going away to boarding school, with the pull handle broken from the time the men loading the bus from the capital city up to school had thrown it from the ground up to the top of the bus. No fancy spinning wheels, just a plain, hard-sided suitcase. A medium sized one, one that had been packed over and over and over again. It had held a sweatshirt for arrival back in the States, it had held leather sandals with car-tyre soles, a wooden recorder, jeans, contraband cassette tapes, both illegally copied and illicitly played in her dorm room with headphones. And now it was going back to Africa, after so long away. Surely it would acquire a few new scars. Katie figured she would, too.
Lappa, two yards of fabric she'd held and hoarded for all these years. Flip-flops, hiking sandals, cool tee-shirts and linen pants. Anti-malarial meds. Water purification tablets. A swimming suit. She wondered what the beaches were like now. Would she finally figure out which beach had now become Poo-Poo Beach?
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