A history student is tasked with sorting through an abandoned asylum's archives. The asylum is rumored to be haunted, but Lena dismisses this as merely town folklore. When her research brings her to venture inside the asylum's walls, however, the fr...
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We both bring two suitcases back with us to the archives, having to clasp them shut tight in our palms since their buckles are giving way. I'm left alone in the small archive office while Donna fixes us some tea.
I set them on the face of the desk and trail my fingers over their torn leather. My fingertips are buzzing with the realness of what is beneath them. These were their suitcases. Theirs.
I lift the rusted buckles up on one and it springs open. It's been kept locked up, bursting, and it breathes freely now in one puff of dust. I cough. Inside, once I can see through the fog, are three linen dresses folded neatly. A pair of well-decorated leather shoes are squished in between them. I comb my fingers gently over the contents... there's a little bible in there, leather cover, and behind the front page is a family photo, ripped and weathered. A mom, a dad, and four siblings look back at me through time.
In these suitcases, I feel the remnants of old hopes. Someone once packed these for an imagined life inside the hospital. They packed clothes, and shoes, and jewelry. They packed books and photos. They didn't know they'd never open these buckles up ever again, and it breaks my heart. Maybe I'm the first person to open them since they were packed.
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They didn't know they would never again need their clothes, that they'd be given that homogenizing uniform of canvas with lunatic stenciled on the back. In these suitcases, there are so many different personalities spoken in clothing and hobbies and books and journals. They are capsules of so many different lives. And yet, they symbolically needed to be left in that room. Left shut. These patients could not bring with them what made them unique; they had to leave behind what made them themselves. Everyone was flattened into the same monochrome category of "lunatic" and the idiosyncratic grooves of their lives were pressed down and left behind the doorway of that dark room.
How could this have been healing? How is the way to get someone back to their normal self by making them leave behind everything that makes them them?
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