The Infinite Starr

The longer you travel, the less you carry.

That is what the old travelers say, usually while standing somewhere they have no intention of staying. They learn to count necessities differently. A coat becomes more important than a second pair of shoes. Water outranks perfume. Books become too heavy unless they are worth the weight.

Eventually, everything must earn its place.

Except the things at the bottom of the backpack.

The backpack was old enough that its original color had become debatable. Black, probably, although years of weather had rubbed the fabric into shades of charcoal and ash. One strap had been stitched twice. The zipper required a particular pull to get around the corner, and the leather tab had been replaced with a piece of black cord tied into a knot.

It had crossed borders.

Slept on floors.

Been shoved beneath train seats, thrown into trunks, carried through rain, forgotten beneath tables and retrieved moments before disaster.

It had been opened by strangers wearing uniforms.

They never found anything interesting.

A few clothes.

A toothbrush.

A book.

Maybe an apple.

They never dug deep enough.

At the bottom was a wooden box.

It was too heavy for its size and entirely unreasonable to carry.

The wood had darkened with age, polished along the edges from being handled. There was no lock. No inscription. Nothing to suggest importance.

Inside were stones.

Not valuable ones, necessarily.

Some were smooth enough to have come from water. Others were jagged, striped, cloudy or almost perfectly black. Mixed among them were crystals, little pieces of quartz, something purple, something pale pink, and a few specimens whose names had been forgotten years ago.

There were flakes of gold wrapped carefully in paper.

Probably worth less than the paper.

Beside them rested a brass animal.

At least, it had once been an animal.

Time and pressure had distorted its body until nobody could say exactly what creature it had been. Four legs remained if you looked carefully. There might have been ears. Perhaps horns. Its back had been flattened and its face worn smooth.

It had lost its shape without losing its place.

The box contained matchbooks from establishments that probably no longer existed. Some had telephone numbers printed without area codes. Others advertised bars, restaurants and hotels in faded lettering. Several were missing matches.

There were photographs too.

Not the important kind people frame.

These were badly exposed photographs with bent corners and fingerprints trapped beneath the gloss. A doorway. A table covered in glasses. Christmas lights somewhere they did not belong. The corner of a motel sign. A blurry stage. An empty chair. A parking lot photographed at night for no apparent reason.

The photographs had faded until some of their details seemed determined to disappear.

There were receipts from nights that should have been forgotten.

The ink had nearly surrendered.

$18.42.

$63.17.

$7.95.

Amounts without meaning anymore.

Dates remained where merchant names had vanished. Merchant names remained where dates had disappeared. One receipt showed only the final four digits of a card that had expired years ago and a tip large enough to suggest either generosity or poor judgment.

There were concert tickets.

Real ones.

Cardboard.

Creased down the center and softened from being carried in pockets. One had rain stains. Another had something sticky along the edge. The names printed across them belonged to bands that had broken up, reunited, broken up again, and eventually begun charging three times as much to play the same songs.

A wrapper had been folded into a tiny square.

Nobody looking at it would understand why garbage had been preserved so carefully.

That was precisely why it remained.

Beside it was the label from a beer bottle, peeled away intact and pressed flat beneath a photograph. The paper still held the faint curve of the glass it had once wrapped around.

And beneath everything else was the notebook.

That was the heaviest thing in the box despite weighing almost nothing.

Black cover.

No title.

Its pages had swollen slightly from humidity, and the corners curled upward as though the book had spent years trying to open itself.

It contained secrets.

Not confessions written for forgiveness.

Not explanations intended for another person.

Just things that had happened and had been written down because, at the time, forgetting them seemed impossible.

Some entries were several pages long.

Others were only a sentence.

There were dates without entries and entries without dates. Names had been crossed out so violently the pen had torn through the paper. Certain pages had been removed entirely, leaving thin ragged edges near the spine.

One page contained only an address.

Another contained six numbers.

Another had a sentence written twice and then covered in black ink.

There was a pressed leaf between pages thirty-two and thirty-three.

Nobody remembered putting it there.

The backpack carried all of it.

Mile after mile.

Year after year.

Its owner became increasingly efficient everywhere else.

Clothing was reduced.

Souvenirs stopped being purchased.

Anything broken was discarded.

Anything replaceable was left behind.

The backpack grew lighter while the wooden box remained exactly the same.

Sometimes another stone was added.

Another ticket.

Another ridiculous scrap of paper whose significance would have been impossible to defend in court.

The box became an archaeological site for a civilization of one.

Nobody else could excavate it correctly.

A stranger would have called most of it trash.

That was the strange privilege of being the person who carried it.

You knew better.

Or perhaps you simply believed you did.

One winter, the bottom seam of the backpack finally split.

It happened in a railway station.

The wooden box struck the floor hard enough for the lid to open.

Everything scattered.

Stones rolled beneath benches.

Crystals skittered across the tile.

The brass creature landed on its side.

Matchbooks fanned across the floor.

Receipts fluttered beneath strangers’ shoes.

The wrapper escaped entirely.

A station employee stepped on one of the faded photographs without noticing.

For several seconds, the owner of the backpack stood perfectly still.

Years were everywhere.

Not arranged carefully inside a wooden box.

Not protected.

Not sacred.

Just scattered across a dirty station floor among coffee cups, footprints and chewing gum.

A little boy picked up the brass animal.

“What is it?”

The question seemed almost offensive.

Then strangely difficult.

The object was turned over in the hand.

Once.

Twice.

“I don’t know.”

The boy studied it.

“A horse?”

Maybe.

He handed it back and ran toward whoever was calling him.

The owner knelt.

The crystals went back first.

Then the gold.

The stones.

The concert tickets.

Some of the photographs.

Three matchbooks.

The notebook.

A hand reached for the old receipt showing $63.17.

Then stopped.

There was no memory attached to it anymore.

Only the certainty that there once had been.

The receipt stayed on the floor.

So did the wrapper.

The beer label was examined for several seconds before joining them.

One photograph remained beneath the bench because nobody could determine why it had ever been taken.

Another stone was left beside the leg of a chair.

Then another.

The box closed more easily than it had in years.

The torn backpack could not be repaired properly, so the wooden box was carried against the chest until a small shop near the station sold a replacement bag.

The new backpack was black.

No stains.

No broken zipper.

No history.

The wooden box fit neatly at the bottom.

There was even room above it.

That evening, in a rented room overlooking a city already disappearing beneath snow, the box was opened again.

The stones were rearranged.

The crystals caught the lamplight.

The gold remained folded in paper.

The misshapen brass animal stood crookedly in the corner.

The notebook waited beneath everything.

Nothing inside had become less precious simply because some of it had been left behind.

That was unexpected.

The box closed.

The backpack sat beside the door.

And sometime after midnight, without anyone touching it, it tipped gently onto its side.

For the first time in years, nothing inside made a sound.