1 passport (expired) 1 ticket, no destination, no date 3 photographs: a woman, a door, a cat 1 notebook, leather, half-filled (entries in a hand that begins confident and ends uncertain) 1 stone, grey, warm from being held 1 ring, silver, sea glass 2 postcards: one from a city that does not appear on any map, one blank 1 scarf, lavender, folded around something (see item 9) 1 clock, small, wooden case, German mechanism, hands moving in no recognizable pattern 1 jar, empty, labeled in Japanese (residue suggests pickled plums) 1 letter, sealed, addressed to "M." (do not open) 1 brass key that opens nothing 0 return tickets 0 phone 0 photographs of the owner 1 note, handwritten, tucked into the passport:
"I am not lost. I have finished. Everything I was carrying I have put down. If you are reading this, one of two things is true: you found this suitcase and are curious, in which case you may keep anything that fits in your pocket and leave the rest for the next person. Or you are me, returning for what I left behind, in which case: don't. You left it for a reason. The suitcase is not yours anymore. It belongs to whoever opens it next.
The woman who found the suitcase in the Sirkeci station kept it closed for three days. She circled it. She moved it from the hallway to the bedroom to the kitchen. On the fourth day she opened it and read the note and looked at the stone and the photographs and the notebook and the clock and the key and she saw that the suitcase was not lost. It had been left. Deliberately.
She added one thing: a ring. Silver, sea glass, found on a bench on the Rialto Bridge years ago. The ring did not belong to the suitcase. But the suitcase was incomplete without something that belonged to its finder.
She closed it. She left it at the station. The note still read:
The city is still there. The door is still green. The coffee is still warm.
Go."