My favorite dress, not that one, the one that you remember so well ―that one survived for no reason in my overflow bag.
A bottle of impossible glowTM that Laura made me buy and that now I don’t know how to live without.
A couple of books I took for the trip and never got to read.
A few campaign flyers and a dammit doll that got whacked so much back in DC against so many tables ―so much frustration, you wouldn’t imagine.
My favorite liquid black eyeliner, the one I wear most days. Almost all my favorite makeup, really, that Arianna picked from my dresser for me to wear during the trip.
Three weeks’ worth of medication that I seem to be doing perfectly fine without, even though I won’t leave that to random chance.
A bunch of receipts that the finance team will ask me about later in the month.
A handful of memories of nights gone by and a stash of dirty laundry I never got to wash.
A bathing suit that never got to fully dry from that last day in Paris, and that must be ruined by now.
A jar of Laneige’s lip mask that made my lips so impossibly soft I thought it was witchcraft.
Stickers, so many stickers. World Bank reports I already read in PDF. All those notes I took and didn’t back up.
The naïve idea that it would be all perfectly fine after crashing against your smile and shattering into a million pieces.
My favorite trench coat. Things I forgot about, I’m sure, and will be randomly remembering for weeks to come. Things I’m trying so hard to forget about.
Photo by Sun Lingyan on Unsplash
Marianne Díaz Hernández (Altagracia de Orituco, Venezuela, 1985). Lawyer, writer and researcher in the intersection between human rights and technology. She has published: Cuentos en el espejo (Monte Ávila Editores, Caracas, 2008, winner of the Contest for Unpublished Authors of Monte Ávila Editores, Narrative), Aviones de papel (Monte Ávila Editores, Caracas, 2011) and Historias de mujeres perversas (El perro y la rana, Caracas, 2013, winner of the I Gustavo Pereira National Biennial of Literature, 2009), and has also been part of the compilations Antología sin fin (Escuela Literaria del Sur, 2013), Voices from the Venezuelan City (Palabras errantes, 2013) , and Nuevo País de las Letras (Banesco, Caracas, 2016). She co-founded the small press Casajena Editoras. Pieces of her work have been translated into English, French and Slovenian. She currently resides in Santiago de Chile.