Squeezing a Life Into a Suitcase

I first moved to London in fall 2021, when I studied abroad at KCL for nearly 4 months. It was my first time ever traveling out of the US and the biggest journey I’d ever taken alone. It was also the first time I had to learn to pack strategically. Conn was a 6-hour drive from Virginia, so I was used to overpacking my family car during move-in day and piling duffel bags in Zoe’s car during holiday breaks. What if I had an emergency and needed 3 different throw blankets? Who would take care of my growing number of plants?

I remember watching countless study abroad packing videos on YouTube the summer before I moved. My anxiety could only be quelled with obsessive research (and Prozac, as I happily discovered a year later). I bought packing cubes and vacuum space-saver bags and asked my little sister, Mikka, to help me decide which sweaters I really needed to pack. Zoe taught me how to roll my clothes and pack strategically in the two years we’d known each other. In the end, I managed to fit everything in a checked bag, a carry-on, and an overstuffed backpack with a coat hanging on my arm.

Flash forward to the end of term in January 2022. I sat in my room with my newfound friends: flatmates and classmates who had become such important and special friends in such a short period of time. They sat with me as I pulled my decorations down from the walls — postcards and scraps of paper from all the places we visited that semester. I packed the red dress my flatmate picked up from Zara for me on Black Friday when I had COVID. I opened my closet and pulled out the vintage red coat I fell in love with in Notting Hill. I wore the black sweatshirt emblazoned with a white KCL logo and red tag.

Mia sat on my bed watching me get teary-eyed with every memory. She was the very first person I met the day we arrived. She messaged in a Facebook group asking if anyone wanted to get dinner, and, after dragging my jet-lagged, motion-sick self out of my pillowless, sheetless bed, I met the girl who would become (and remain to this day) one of my closest friends. She was from Oslo, Norway and thought I was from Denmark because of my name. She quickly realized that she’d befriended a silly American girl with a very Danish name.

We were inseparable for much of the semester. We worked on the stunning terrace of KCL’s Bush House after classes, traveled to Edinburgh with a group of friends, and accidentally got tipsy by the Thames before a salsa class on her birthday. Packing up the remnants of our adventures together was heartbreaking, especially since we’d soon be an ocean and several timezones apart, unsure when we’d see each other again (I ended up visiting her in Oslo 5 months later so it wasn’t as bad as we thought, but nonetheless!)

“You know,” she started saying. “Isn’t it amazing how much we have done since we first arrived? And now we have to try and fit a life into just two suitcases?” She continued musing in her philosophical Norwegian lilt about the physical, material souvenirs we have compared to the intangible adventures and experiences we had. We concluded that although things like new clothes and countless Polaroids are still so precious to us, the friendships and memories we made would grow larger and more valuable than what any suitcase could hold.

That simple revelation has stuck with me ever since. Now, two years after I first packed up my suitcases to fly across the world, I feel much, much calmer. I dug out the same packing cubes and vacuum seal bags and started filling my suitcases with clothes and paintings and random small toiletries. The red Zara dress, red Notting Hill coat, and KCL sweatshirt are tucked safely inside. I bestowed my massive plant collection on my green-thumbed family and said goodbye to my stuffed animal shark, Blåhaj, who I would not attempt to squish in a suitcase.

I'm not quite as efficient as Zoe yet, and I know I'm probably (definitely) still overpacking, but I just remember what Mia said and feel better. I can't wait to move across the pond again with my best friend and live our London dreams together. As always, we'll still be just a wall apart, but now we can adjust to living in an adorable flat instead of a dorm!

Hope you all are as happy reading this as Zoe was when I gave her fan art of Micky Van de Ven! And Micky, if you are somehow reading this, hey... you're so fine.

Catja