“You hold the answers deep within your own mind. Consciously, you’ve forgotten it. That’s the way human mind works. Whenever something is too unpleasant, too shameful for us to entertain, we reject it. We erase it from our memories. But the imprint is always there.”
I spread the newspaper on the pavement, put my suitcase on it and sit down in the suitcase. Every now and then I see men and women walking fast with formal clothes. It must be seven or eight o'clock in the morning. People are talking. A few of them pass by and don't look at me. A man about thirty years old approaches me and throws a five hundred tomans coin in my skirt. How can I even buy a newspaper with this amount of money? My ankles hurt for sitting in a rectangular space since I’ve been sitting in it for about several years. A woman in a green coat approaches me with a smile and gives me another coin. Now I have just seven hundred tomans. My eyes follow her walking with firm steps. My old friend appears from the crowd; her hair is clean and fresh. Oh God, she will boast herself all today again.
“Hello little dirty BEGGAR!” she said; playing with her pigtails.
I put my head in my skirt so that she won’t see me crying. Did she call me a beggar? My grandmother told me when she was 70 years old that we live like dandelions (Not beggars). Dandelions that are afraid of the wind. "From what wind?" I asked her.
"The same winds that people make when they don’t notice us and pass; so we have less chance to live longer." She said.
"What if I was threatened by the wind?" I asked.
She handed me my suitcase and said that I would be safe in this suitcase at all times. “This will be your shelter.” And then she slept. When I asked the doctors the next day about her, they said that she passed away…
The sound of a cane and a man’s conversation on the phone gets my attention. What if a person kidnaps me and… oh God, I don’t want to think about it. I move a little in the suitcase. The upper side of my suitcase hit my head. That’s humiliating. Damn it. I can hear the man's voice with the cane next to me. He isn’t talking with his phone anymore. “This is a game, darling.” More tears are pouring in my skirt now, he has no idea how terrifying is to look for a place to sleep for an 8-year-old like me. At night and alone. I raised my head and cried: “JUST TELL ME YOU’LL LIVE THROUGH THIS ‘GAME’ FOR ONE DAY AND I’LL DIE FOR YOU!” After some minutes of silence, he joins the crowd.
Thank God my friend had gone for lunch and didn’t hear me. What should I do more if it really is a game? I screamed to fight it out loud in the crowd, nobody took me somewhere that I could call it home. I hoped that it would disappear, I cried my eyes out, but none of them worked…
I push the suitcase’s upper part and erase my tears. It’s near sunset now; time for me to go somewhere and try to sleep in my grave-like suitcase with only 10 coins and hunger. “Goodbye.” my friend with clean hair said.
“Goodbye,” Trying to hide my trembling voice.
Is it a game? I don’t know.
“…But the imprint is always there, nothing is ever really forgotten.”
