Suitcase Traveller

Recently, for the second time in my life, I used a suitcase.
The first time was when I was about nine years old, going for a sleepover at a friend's house. My parents had this dinky little blue and white 60s era overnight-case, just the perfect size for a kid. I considered it the height of cool: with the case, I was cosmopolitan, even at nine.
I packed it up with all the essentials a nine year old needs for a sleepover, insisting to my Mum that taking the case for a one night stay at the house round the corner was absolutely appropriate. Actually, I don't know if she asked.
It went perfectly until my friend came around to pick me up, driven by her older brother. Perhaps it was part crush, part awe (he was the only older sibling of any of my friends who was even approaching adulthood), but I was determined to impress this guy. The suitcase, with all its blue and white boxy glory, was my secret weapon.
I imagined how it would go: he'd see me standing there, suitcase in hand, and realise that I was not a child, but a traveller, a sophisticate, confident, a person who knows precisely how much or little they need in life, and has it all on hand, folded neatly. After all, isn't this what your luggage says about you?
And even though all that happened was that he looked at me, looked at my suitcase, and, very kindly, offered to carry it; with that gesture I knew suddenly that I'd gotten it horribly wrong, that I should have worn my grungiest clothes and packed a ninja turtles backpack like everyone else. I was just a kid playing at being a grown up.
Perhaps this early experience had something to do with it but for the next twenty years I haven't gone near a suitcase. Travel has meant backpacks, kitted out with pockets in concealed locations, straps for who-knows-what, top-loading, side zippered contraptions that weight in at close to what I do. My backpacks have gone places that a suitcase would never make it, hauled up the dirtiest tracks, flung onto the roofs of chicken filled buses, stowed in the holds of the most unseaworthy looking ferries. They've been a part of the way I've travelled.
But coming to Chile, this time around I packed a suitcase. 
I told myself it was because while I didn't need portability, I did need space. Especially for the 600g jar of Vegemite that was first into the bag. There was no way I was leaving that behind.
Walking through the gates at Santiago airport, bleary eyed from 14 hours on the plane and wondering through the sleepless haze whether O and I would still look the same to each other, I remembered that other time, waiting to be picked up, suitcase in hand.
Who says people change - I'm still humming the same tune.