Life of leather

How tenderly we speak of a leather bag.

We turn it over in our hands, admire the creases, the darkened corners, the leather gone soft as a palm from years of being held.

“Look how much life it has in it!”

As though the scratches were little maps,
the fraying a kind of handwriting, 

each stain a place we once stood with our hands full of something we thought we needed.

And then, 
one day, 
the strap gives way.

The leather splits at the seam. 
The bag can no longer carry what it carried so faithfully.

We say it has lived. We say it has been loved.

We remember the long walks, 
the rain caught in its folds, 
the things we slipped inside without thinking;  a receipt, a stone, a letter, the small, loose evidence of being alive.

But we are strange creatures.

We look at the bag, 
worn thin by the world, and see a soul.

We look at ourselves, 
at the places life has rubbed us raw, 
the seams pulled crooked by years of carrying, and call it something else.
As if a human being should come through life without the weather getting in.
As if we ought to remain the smooth, untouched leather we were before the world put its hands on us.
And somewhere in the back of a closet, the bag lies folded into itself, its handles curled like fingers, a little dust gathering in the hollows.

We remember it everywhere.

We say it saw a life.

And what is it, exactly, that we are looking at when we say that?