What I couldn't Pack

On what we leave behind, and what follows us anyway...

The Suitcase

My mom was crossing items off her list while I packed my suitcase. I placed a few pieces of my life inside: the frame my friend had given me for my eighteenth birthday, the book signed by my favorite author, my first doll, and the art piece I had poured so much love into. Then I stepped back and looked at the overflowing suitcase. The zipper barely closed. That was when I realized I couldn’t take everything with me.

You can’t pack your parents. You can’t pack your siblings or your friends. You can’t pack your mom’s cooking, your hometown, or the version of yourself that only existed there. I didn’t have a name for that feeling yet. I didn’t know if it was sacrifice, loss, or a kind of grief I didn’t have words for.

In the last few months before leaving, everything started to feel different. I ordered food from my favorite restaurant, walked into the stores I had always gone to, met my friends, and suddenly every moment felt like a countdown. I looked at everything a little longer, not knowing when, or if, I would experience it again. I remember holding my grandmother’s hands a little tighter than usual, trying to memorize their warmth. Somewhere deep inside, I knew there might not be another goodbye, and there wasn’t.

I packed three suitcases, but what I carried was heavier than all of them: the weight of every goodbye, a small piece of my heart tucked into each one. There was also this unspoken rule in our home that we all had to look strong. No one said it out loud, but we were all trying not to fall apart. I could see the worry in my parents’ eyes, even when they tried to hide it behind encouragement and smiles. I was moving to a country I had never seen, only imagined. Yes, I knew some English, but looking back now, I could barely form a real sentence.

Sometimes I think about my parents and wonder how they managed it. How it must have felt to watch their child step into the unknown, trusting that she would somehow find her way. Some people kept asking, “Why are you leaving?”Sometimes there was a sense of guilt in it. Not always intentional, but present in the way people asked. When you leave a place that may not always feel stable, but is filled with love and history, you are not leaving just to explore the world. You are leaving for possibility, for a future that might be better.

And in that moment, you don’t always have the space to feel everything. The weight of the future becomes so heavy that your emotions are pushed aside, hidden somewhere behind the clouds. In the culture I grew up in, success mattered deeply. It was not about sitting with failure. It was about learning how to win next time. Keep going. Be strong. Make it worth it.

But life does not always follow that pattern. At some point, it slows you down. It asks you to feel what you did not have time to feel back then. And what you couldn’t carry in your suitcase finds its way back to you anyway.

Maybe we don’t return to ourselves by going back. Maybe we return by making room for the parts of us that were left behind, the feelings we had to postpone, and the goodbyes we never fully got to grieve.

A question I’m sitting with:

What is something you had to leave behind, but still carry in you?

With heart,

Bahar