Journey of an Unknown

Every morning, along the route I drive twice a day, after dropping my husband off at work and on our return journey home, I see something sitting off to the side of the road.  There is a box, about two feet by four feet, and approximately eighteen inches tall.  On top of that is a jacket, nice, puffy, navy blue and white.

They have been sitting there, the lonely pair, for months and months. Their location is in the shadow of a tree, behind a shrub and the brick corner pillar of a tall wrought iron fence.  I suppose the owner never travels that way, or perhaps doesn't care that the box and coat have take up residence.

It is near a bus stop, and so seeing clutter there didn't surprise me at first. I imagined that the owner had forgotten the packages in a hurry to his destination.  Then, after several weeks, I imagined that maybe they had fallen out of the back of a truck as it sped by.  Perhaps a kind bus traveler had retrieved them from the road, in case their owner returned, searching for their wayward wares.

I suppose after the first two months passed, I began to imagine something more grave. I pictured an old man, perhaps a veteran, waiting for a bus in the cold. As he waited in the sun, he began to overheat and removed his coat. Placing his prized jacket there on his box, he continued waiting patiently for the bus. There was suddenly a commotion as the rest of the people waiting watched the man grab his chest and fall to the floor. Someone called 9-1-1, someone else helped him lay down, and after an eternal ten minutes, the man was bundled in to an ambulance and careened away to a hospital, all thought of his treasured possessions forgotten in a panicked blur.

In my mind they sit, weathering in the elements, visibly undisturbed by wind, nor animal nor man.  Almost as if they are a monument to the imaginary veteran whose fate my imagination is too wary to construct. Is that sad forgotten collection, visible or invisible to the thousands who drive past every week, a deteriorating tombstone, or a monument pillar to a life renewed?