Author: Eva Nechai
The Bag That Carried a Life
She bought it when everything was just beginning.
She was twenty-three. Behind her — university. Ahead — Paris, an internship at a small publishing house, and a dream of becoming a writer. The Coccinelle bag sat behind a dusty window in an old Kyiv boutique. The color — warm caramel. The leather — as if it breathed. She couldn’t really afford it, but still, she emptied her card.
— “One day, I’ll be in Paris with this bag,” she told the shopkeeper. And herself.
And off they went.
Paris greeted her with rain. In the bag — a passport, one notebook, a letter from her mother, and a one-way ticket. She lived in an attic room with a glass roof, wrote at night, sold croissants in the mornings. The bag got scuffed, faded at the corners, but still smelled like leather — and home.
Years passed. Paris became her second heart. She fell in love — once, twice, again. They didn’t love her back. Or they left. Only the bag stayed.
One Christmas, when she was thirty-two, she went home — for the first time in ten years. Her mother was sick. Very. The train smelled of mildew and sorrow. In the bag — a small tin of French tea, a letter in clumsy Ukrainian, and an old bookmark from Montmartre. Her mother didn’t recognize her. Three days later, she died.
After the funeral, she sat on the old couch and flipped through the notebook she'd carried in that same bag for years. The notes were about love. Pain. Loss. Hope.
And she realized: she was finally a writer.
Back in Paris, she sold almost everything — except the bag. And she wrote a book.
Its first line read:
“I was never alone. I had a bag that carried my life.”
The book got published. Then another. She was invited to interviews, readings. Everyone asked, “Why do you still carry that old bag?”
She smiled.
— “Because it remembers who I was when I didn’t believe I could become who I am.”
Years later, at sixty, she sat by the window in Provence. The house was full of light, but autumn lived in her chest. She knew — soon.
The last thing she did was gently place a letter inside the Coccinelle bag.
“If you find this bag — open it.
And know: every step, every pain, every joy — it all mattered.
Live. Love.
And carry it with pride.
It’s yours now.”
