Nobody Packs the Photographs

The photographs stay. This is the most consistent finding and the most surprising one, and the explanation people give is always the same: there was no time, and there were too many, and you cannot choose between them so you choose none.

What comes instead is smaller and stranger.

• —A door key, for a door that is either still there or is not, kept in a drawer and never discussed.
• —One coffee cup from a set of six. Not the set. One.
• —A school certificate, which is the only document on the list that is also useful, and which several people said they took for practical reasons and then admitted they had not.
• —A spice tin, empty, refilled many times since, and now containing something bought locally that is not the same.
• —A telephone number written on paper, for a landline that stopped working years ago.

You do not carry the thing that reminds you of home. You carry the thing you would have used at home tomorrow.

The photographs, meanwhile, turn out to be the easiest thing to get back. They are the one category that travels by itself: scanned by a cousin, sent, forwarded, arriving years later on a phone in a different country, slightly crooked and slightly too bright.

The key does not come back. Neither does the cup.