...Fernando decided to go on an adventure

Imagine this: you’ve just spent the most wonderful year abroad, found new friends, experienced awesome things and now its time to leave. Imagine you have all your stuff – everything you managed to accumulate in the course of the year – in one huge suitcase. Imagine a looooong flight home: three layovers, one of them being 12 hours long and 30 hours of travelling altogether. And now imagine that you get to your home airport and your suitcase – you know, the one with a year’s worth of your stuff (including some sentimental mementos) in in – is gone. Just... gone...

That’s what happened to me after I left Japan. 30 hours of travelling, during which I managed to get about 4 hours of sleep, and the first thing I find out after landing is that my suitcase is missing. It was about 10 pm and I was tired, sleep deprived and feeling shitty in general. And there I was: standing in the airport, waiting for my suitcase (henceforth known as Fernando). I stood there looking like an idiot for almost an hour – by that time I’d lost all hope and there were no more bags coming from my flight. So I walked to the corner of the room, took a seat and cried. Yup, just broke down crying in an airport.

So after five minutes of breaking down and making everybody else in my immediate vicinity feel really uncomfortable, I finally contacted an airport employee and filed a missing suitcase report. Then I went home (which was a two hour drive away). It was a horrible end to a horrible flight.

A week passed... and then two... and there were no news of Fernando. I called the airport and they told me that since so much time had passed they were treating it as a ’special case’ (whatever that means). I also understood that the longer a suitcase is missing the less likely they are to find it. Just as with missing persons cases – the first 48 hours are the most important. I told them I saw Fernando before my last flight, next to the plane in Frankfurt (because I did). They said they’re looking into it. I started losing hope...

And then I went to Finland to visit my friends and have a sort of reunion party in a summer cottage. I was on the train when the call came – they had found Fernando and were delivering him to my apartment in a few days. A part of me was overjoyed! The other part said: ’Really? They find him now? As I am leaving the country again? Bastards!’ By that time I had almost given up all hope of finding him again. The days I spent in Finland and later in Tallinn managed to make me forget about him again so when I finally arrived in my apartment again I was a bit surprised to see Fernando standing by the window, looking a bit bruised and battered but intact. Alive. Or as alive as an inanimate object could be...

Our reunion was sweet though. I promised to never let him go again (a promise I would later break) and he promised... Well, he didn’t promise anything. Because he’s a suitcase. He can't speak...