I am sitting here on the bank of the river, under the open sky, wide open and full of water from the rains of the last week. Until last month, I traveled around the world. By bus, by train, by ferry, by plane and even in a carriage pulled by 4 beautiful white horses. I traveled Europe far and wide, I went to faraway Patagonia, to Korea and Japan, I passed through the frozen forests of Siberia during the winter, I enjoyed the waves of the Mediterranean on a long cruise.
I lived in luxury hotels and modest guesthouses. I was gracefully handled by valets or brutally thrown from the belly of airplanes. I got out of these passes with only a few scratches. Thus, I am a very resistant suitcase, born in a factory in the Far East, from an innovative material capable of withstanding the strongest shocks.
In my long journeys I had only one master. Which I lost last week when, in a moment of inattention, I was robbed by an inexperienced thief, directly from the hold of the bus. He hoped that my locks were easy to undo. Or maybe I could be broken. No way, he didn’t succeed. Fearing he would be caught, he abandoned me in the bushes on the banks of this river.
I would have stayed there for a long, long time if someone more skilled in opening locks hadn’t found me. He opened my body, yanking out the safety systems, then carefully examined the contents. He took the more important goods and then left, leaving me in the sun. In the following days I was completely emptied, as you can see.
Then the rain had mercy and filled me with this clean water. Now, I am an open suitcase. No locks and no chance of someone taking me with him. I will sit here on the bank of the river watching the flowing water. The sky is high and blue. Birds flying free. Maybe one day the water will rise enough and take me with it. I could travel to the big river and then to its delta. Maybe I will be shipwrecked on a sandbank where I will sink for the rest of my life. Or maybe I will find my rest at the bottom of the sea. Or maybe someone will find me useful, as a simple storage container. In a junkyard, as an old toolbox.
Anyhow it will be, I know that my life is long, much longer than yours, my dear reader. Very slowly, the time will break small particles from the plastic of my body. In many hundreds of years, I will disappear diluted into the creatures of the sea. Maybe one day your children’s children will eat a fish and some of my molecules.
Now I am quietly sitting, dreaming on the bank of this river. I heard, yesterday, a fisherman saying “water passes, stones remain”. That’s right, except that the stones are much easier to break and turn into sand. Their life is much shorter than mine. Maybe it would be better to say “life passes, plastic lasts forever”.
