To My Grandmother...

London. Waiting for a connecting flight.

People running around me with heavy pieces of luggage. A girl tripped on the cord of her heavy suitcase, an old lady is looking worried at the time on her boarding pass while she slowly pushes a pulley full of bags. So much weight. So many ties. Each bag, another worry, another responsability.

Life turns into an airport. Going through different terminals, changing gates, waiting for that flight that changes everything. Some travel through carrying heavy suitcases, while others chose to take the bare minimum. If you asked the customs workers they would say that for them the most challenging pieces of luggage are those filled with love. Sometimes their weight even turns negative and they end up making their possesors feel lighter. Other times they are so heavy that scared, the scales lock down before them, afraid they would to break under so much weight.

But the question is, what happends when one looses such a piece of luggage? And, above all, what happends if this pice was not a random gift bought in a duty free shop, but something one can not live without, like a piece of heart turned into love and wrapped carefully and hidden at a bottom of a bag. Well, no matter if it's heavy or light, such a loss never reduces the weight of the heart or the soul. Instead the loss itself becomes internal, organic, like a pocket of pain, bitter love and regret that becomes part of you. Hugs turn into memories and words never spoken turn into dreams and with time, like with any tumor, the body fights is and most times the loss becomes smaller and smaller sometimes only to make room for other lost or misplaced items that will grow into the soul.

As with every implant of something foreign, of something that is not supposed to be there, the soul rejects the loss at first. Just like with any foreign organ, the body will come up with ways to push it out. The stomach will hurt, the heart will bleed, the brain will obsess over other problems. Subjects are known to have immerged themselves blindly into their work, to obsess over a crush, watch endless movies or to spend hours and hours over the phone discussing problems that are not their own.


As for me.. still waiting for my plane, still in London. Traveling light, the bare minimim. No heavy bags, except one, the one slowly growing in my heart, slowly injecting weight into my blood. I want to stand up and start running back. Back to when things were light, when I could do something, when I could talk to her and say I love you. But I have to go. They're calling my flight and soon I will be home. I know everything will change but for now I'm still hiding behind polite smiles and conversations, still rejecting the foreign feeling of loss deep down, below my stomach.