A Traveling Designer and her Creative Suitcase

It rained for three days straight. That is what I remember. We shivered under murky skies, huddled under building overhangs. Overprotective TV mom voices hummed in my head You'll catch cold, going out in that. It was the sort of air that should have made us unhappy tourists dissatisfied guests but the gray sky and I got along from the beginning. It was not a latent sadness or a billowing storm that I saw reflected, from my crouch under the city awnings; rather, I looked into the slumping rain clouds and felt a dizzy recognition. It was as though we had known each other for years.

I came to Dublin as a part of a long tour of Europe as a part of a long friendship. In the friendship, we'd whispered and wished and fantasized of our grand adventure: of the people we'd meet, the parties we'd make, the places we'd find. And always the whispers culminated in Ireland and Dublin, with hopes recklessly pinned on craic and famous Irish company, and the fantastic accents, to string our trip into something meaningful, or enviable, or fun.

My friend, Lindsey, was the best friend I'd had in my years through college. A slender, wisp of a person who looked small only when she slept. Awake, Lindsey made you forget that the world around existed, which was perhaps both her greatest attraction and fault. Standing next to her was standing in a private world, where what we ate for dinner was a major decision and where we would sleep that night, what we would do when we returned home, broke, was inconsequential. She belonged against the streets of Ireland, though she may not have known it, with red hair that looked better after it had been rained on and a laugh that perfectly reflected the Irish sense of adventure and carefreeness.

It was my first semester away at university that Lindsey and I met. For most of high school I had been arrogant and soaked in my own importance, although I was by no means cool or popular. My last high school semester squeezed the pride out of me, and I began college as a shadow of the Person From Before. But as I came to know Lindsey, worries became jokes, jokes became pillars of import, and the shadow switched places with the person it'd cradled. In a silly, childish world, Lindsey and I learned to be grown-ups together. We d grown out of dorms and crushes, into apartments and one-night-stands. We'd outlasted four years of college and graduation. And we'd ventured onto our backpacking tour of Europe.

The rain continued to collapse onto town, spattering us even in the dry patch next to a converted opera house-theater. Tiny cars, the kind Europeans are proud of, sputtered by and umbrella-protected locals carried on, unperturbed, their wellies cheerily slapping the sidewalk like the rhythmic claps of an indiepop band.

I am so cold, Lindsey whimpered.

I agreed. The bite of cold in June smacked of bitterness to girls accustomed to heavy Texas heat.

We could watch a movie, Lindsey suggested, smiling through her frown. We had watched three movies in three days at the opera house-theater to keep dry. But Dublin had secrets to tell us yet, and I'd spent the morning idling the hours on the internet, waiting, while Lindsey slept in. An old tourist bus splashed through the street rolled to a stop in front of us. I lifted an eyebrow at my friend, and we clambered aboard.

It was not the way I preferred to befriend the city: aboard a bus of distanced tourists, hearing embellished tales from a driver/guide who was called Patty and dressed more like a leprechaun than could possibly be coincidence. But at least I could see the City, learn his angles and creases, study his movements from afar. I would know how to treat him someday when I returned on my own because I could already see that he would call to me.

Under the slick of rain, he moved with delicacy and force, like a fighter jet in slow motion. There was history, yes, evident in the high spires of lonely old churches, the fat-bricked castle, the post-office marred by bullet holes. But as dandelions spring over graves, around the history, life had grown. Pubs bustling with people cornered every block. Bookshops, coffee shops, and hi-tech stores seemed to creep from every nook. And pedestrians were everywhere.

I wondered vaguely about those pedestrians. Where were they headed? Where were they coming from? Were they originally Irish, or passersthrough like me? It was my mind's love affair with strangers that never ceased reaching out to caress them even as they slipped away in silence. Next to me, Lindsey talked about cheese sandwiches and grape juice. She missed her American food.

Five years before, at sixteen, I had traveled alone to Costa Rica, to live there for a summer with a host family. My host mom, a Hispanic Ashley Judd with the personality of a prom queen, had been hosted by another family in the States twenty years before that. In America, I took so many pictures, she told me, I always had my Kodak out snap, snap, snap, she said, her fingers framed around an invisible camera. And I met my family, and my mom was there, and I went up to her right away, and I say Mom! She threw her arms into a hugging motion, and I could imagine her, jumping forward, stealing this stranger into her arms claiming her as her own. I envied her: the immediate recognition, the unquestioning sense of possession.

I could never behave as my host mom did. Not with people, not even with cities. No, people, cities, and I came to know one another with a fluttering uncertainty that brightened and dimmed almost imperceptibly as the winds shifted, as the weather changed. In Dublin, the wind and I grew closer, and in its brightening breeze, or something like rain, a friendship went out.

A. Lauren Nelsen
Fremont, CA