CANDID

It’s likely that anyone reasonably acquainted with me, upon seeing me walking across campus from behind, even a great distance, would recognize me immediately. This has nothing to do with my physical appearance—I am of average height and build, blonde, like so many others, and would blend into a crowd easily, except for my backpack. It’s also likely that any other student walking across my campus wearing a backpack just like the one I have—Swiss Gear, grey and blue—would not quite stick out from the crowd the way I do wearing mine. Someone with a bag like mine might not even recognize that the two bags are the same. As a matter of fact, something like that has happened before: once on the bus, I found myself staring at a boy’s backpack across the aisle, wondering what it was about it that caught my eye, and it took me several long minutes to realize that it was my backpack, but in remarkably better shape.

 

It has three main pouches; the largest one containing a spot for a laptop, a slightly smaller middle one, and a tiny wallet-sized one in the front. Being made by Swiss, it also contains countless other hidden nooks and crannies for storing things, with pockets inside each pouch. There are two side pockets for water bottles, one of which I always have stuffed with pencils, pens, and eating utensils, which are constantly falling out and spilling everywhere. The backpack is mostly a dark grey, with a blue ribcage running up and down its front. The one I saw carried by the stranger on the bus was small and skinny, almost starved. Mine looks gluttonous in comparison, gorged and stretched beyond hope of ever returning to normal size. 

 

It is covered nearly every inch in patches; eighteen in total. Many are from countries I’ve visited with this backpack in tow—Tanzania, England, France, Ireland, and more—or places I’ve been in the U.S.: Savannah, the Parthenon in Nashville, Hueston Woods State Park. There is a Miami Redhawk on one side, to represent my alma mater. There are two little ducks on the smallest pouch, remnants of my favorite childhood denim shorts. My mom got misty-eyed when I sewed those on. Yet another patch says “McBusted,” the name of the band that played the best show I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s also a patch with Jack Sparrow’s face on it. That one’s just for fun. 

 

It’s falling apart, my backpack, particularly the right shoulder strap, where I always grab it and sling it over my shoulder. The strap has stretched out and has been seown back on. The seam is unraveling. On the flip side of it, the part that rests against my shoulder when worn, my dad has sewn on an additional strip of materiael for reinforcement. There are two patches on that strap simply to make it sturdier. One of the zippers is broken and has been replaced with a keychain holder. A hand-sized stuffed Dalmatian keychain dangles from the right side (next to another keychain of a Van Gogh painting); he was a gift from my first boyfriend, who is long gone though the dog’s still here. His tag calls him “Fetch.”

 

I got the backpack at the end of the summer before my freshman year of college, at a Target. It was expensive, but it came with a lifetime warranty and my mother was in such an emotional state about my going away that I think she would have denied me nothing that week. I picked it up, I think, because it was blue. Beyond that I had no other qualifications; I only needed something with straps and zippers, sturdier than the messenger bag I had worn across my chest, thumping against my right thigh, every day in high school.  

 

I shrugged it on, flat and empty, in the aisle of Target, turning around for Mom so she could see how it looked.

“Make sure you like it,” she said. “This backpack is going to be with you the next four years. It’s going to see a lot.” She said a lot of sentimental things like “it’s going to see a lot” that summer, which I ignored.

 

I shifted my weight. I practiced carrying it on one shoulder, on two shoulders. I pulled on the cord that dangled beneath the right strap, allowing it to be loosened or tightened. This would become a nervous habit of mine every time I wore it, so much so that the plastic loop at the end of it would break within months. Later I would develop the tendency to slip the cracked loop in and out of the identical plastic piece on the left shoulder strap as I walked. 

I declared it the one. 

 

It wasn’t until one year later, the summer after my freshman year of college, that I got the first patch. If it weren’t for occasionally seeing the original canvas of my backpack worn by strangers in hallways, I would not even remember what my backpack looked like that first year. I don’t remember a time without it being covered in patches and keychains, but that year it had to have been as blank and empty as the starving one on the bus. I must have had it with me on the last day of my botany sprint course, a chilly October Thursday, and it must have come with Phil and I that evening, on my shoulder when he picked me up, my backpack third-wheeling our date.  I wonder if the backpack was as nervous as I was that night, sweating beneath its shoulder straps by my feet in the car of the first boy that ever liked me.

 

Most importantly, it was on my back when I took that last step from airport to airplane—you know the one, where there’s a little crack of light between the two, and you can see straight down to the ground—and I remember thinking, This is your last chance to turn around, and I put my foot down on the airplane and gripped the dangling straps from by backpack tight and did not touch earth again until I was in Addis Ababa, EthiopaEthiopia. I used a keychain clip to hold the zippers of my backpack together so no one could get into it with my back turned, and I sat on top of it as pseudo-seat in the Ethiopian airport during the layover.

Our final destination was Arusha, Tanzania, where a group of volunteer students, ten in total, would be staying for the entire month of July, 2012. It remains to this day the farthest away from home I have ever been. I was nineteen years old. It was my first time out of the country, my first time traveling without my parents, and my first time away from my then-boyfriend. The entire plane ride there—over thirteen hours—I made myself sick with tears, tension, and anxiety. It’s a sensation I commonly equate to having a bowling ball in my stomach. 

In the car from the airport to the house in the village, Georgina, who I had sat next to on the plane, asked me how I was doing. I started to cry again as soon as she spoke to me.

 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, growing concerned.

 

“Oh god, this is embarrassing,” I said, trying to laugh through my tears. I hugged my backpack to my chest the entire van ride. She smiled at me, but did not try to engage me in conversation again.

 

Another girl, Hannah, said, “Once we get there, you will feel ten times better. I promise.” She was one of the oldest, and one of the tiniest, on the trip. She wore her long curly hair in tangles so tight they almost looked like dreadlocks. It was impossible to have a conversation with her that didn’t include at least one sentence that began: “When I was in India,” where she had studied abroad for a semester a year before. (I would tease her for this, until two years later when I went to London, and began every story there with, “When I was in Africa…”)

 

“When I was in India,” she said that first day, “I was scared shitless when I first got there, but by the second day, once we got settled and actually started doing stuff, all of that anxiety went away. I promise you’ll be fine. You’ll forget to even miss the people at home once we get into things.” 

 

I nodded and stared at the backpack that rested in her lap. It was as loyal a companion to her as mine would become to me, you could tell just by looking. It was tinier than mine, less structured—all big open pouches without the smaller compartments—and a dark, forest green. It was more equipped to handle a multitude of patches than mine was, since it was a thin canvas and contained no extra padding. The patches themselves were from all over. The only one I remember with any detail did not represent a country, but some kind of charity with a whale on it. It was a blue and white circle, stitched down low and apart from the rest. 

“I bought it off a guy in a market in India, who really wanted me take it, to match my other patches,” she explained with a shrug.

 

I was so impressed. I resolved that when she bought a patch for Tanzania, I would do the same. We did not get the chance to do so until the weekend we visited Kilimanjaro. I bought one with two giraffes on it, a mother and a baby, Tanzania curled in black script below them. I don’t remember what she got, but that very evening, by the light of a flashlight, we sewed them on together. 

 

Three weeks later, I bought another patch to put on directly below the first: a square one colored like a flag for Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania where we spent that last glorious weekend before we went home. Hannah didn’t buy one there; Zanzibar is a ‘Republic of Tanzania,’ so she didn’t count it as separate, but I was so eager to fill every inch of my backpack that I couldn’t resist.

 

On the plane ride home, I stared at my two patches and dreamed of the ones that would soon join them. I wanted to add one for my favorite band—McFly (later to be called McBusted)—because in a month’s time I was taking my first Greyhound bus trip, going to New York City for one day only, to see them live. My backpack would be there for that journey, too, smashed between my knees for over twelve hours while I waited in line, and coat-checked at the door before the concert started. I knew even then that I wanted to study abroad in England, and so two years later I would collect a number of patches from that life-changing summer. My backpack was there the day we almost missed the plane to Paris, full of the only food besides crepes that I would eat that weekend. It was with me on the thirteen hour Megabus ride to Scotland, a footrest, and it was stuffed to the brim with books from every bookshop in London on the way home. Traveling the UK that summer, it and the possessions inside were often all I had to my name in the world.  

 

It was at the foot of the hospital bed when my grandpa died. It was tossed in the back of a trunk for countless road trips. It was my pillow on the worst night of my life, when I spent an overnight layover in the Washington, D.C. airport before the plane ride to Tanzania, where I hiccupped and cried until my nose ran and even then did not stop, at 3AM while everyone else was sleeping. It was tossed casually on the floor during the best night of my life, and lay all night on its side, looking politely away, in the bedroom of a man that I was rapidly falling in love with. It was in the car with my mother and me the next day, when I lied about where we had been the night before. It knew the truth, and it did not tell. 

 

We were together on dozens of bus rides to Cleveland to visit the boy that had given me the Dalmatian (which he bought on a weekend trip to Michigan, where my backpack was also present). It was open on my bed, its paper guts and homework spilling out, the night I broke up with that same boyfriend over Skype because I said I wanted to focus on school. It was the first one to know I had lied about that, too. It has kept my secrets, confessing them again only to me every time I put it on my back.

 

Daily it carries my lunch (and sometimes dinner) and my laptop, all my textbooks. Sometimes it carries a change of clothes, extra shoes. I have toiletries and medicine and makeup in its depths. It’s heavy. It probably smells, though I don’t notice it. It’s in the way a lot. It’s a tripping hazard. I get tired of lugging that thing around with me, to and from class, every single day. But I could not go anywhere without it, attached as we are. I’m sure it would hate to feel left behind. It has seen too much to be discarded, like a best friend, like a lover. Sometimes when I look at it I find myself wondering what it would say if only I’d ask it a question. 

I must have had that backpack with me on my first day of college, an intro to creative writing class, a wide-eyed freshman with the campus map tucked away in a tiny pocket above the middle pouch (where it still resides today, torn and wrinkled and untouched for years). And I will have it with me on the last day, a mere four weeks from now, the right shoulder strap quite literally falling apart, dirt-stained, scarred, over 15,000 miles and eight countries the worse for the wear, tired and scared and overweight, and still ready to take on the world—or at least, still ready to come along for the ride.