The Suitcase

You pack what you can carry. Not what you need— what you can carry. Because need is infinite and the suitcase is not. One photo. One sweater that smells like home. Documents that prove you exist to a government that doesn't want to know. The language is the heaviest thing you bring. It fills no space in the suitcase but weighs on every conversation, every job interview, every parent-teacher meeting where your accent makes people speak slower, louder, as if the problem is your ears and not their imagination. You leave because staying is worse. Let that sit. Nobody leaves their country for fun. Nobody leaves their mother's kitchen and their father's stories and the particular way the light hits their street at six PM because they felt like an adventure. They leave because the alternative is a kind of death— slow or fast, but death. And they arrive and they work jobs that are beneath their degrees and above their desperation and they send money back to the place they left because the suitcase had no room for everyone. Immigration is not a policy. It is a person standing in a new country with a suitcase that contains everything they could save from a life that couldn't be saved. Remember the suitcase. Before the debate. Before the vote. Before the opinion. Remember what fits inside it and what had to be left behind.