Backpacking through the Years

For the last six years I’ve had a constant friend. A friend who smoothly transitioned with me from high school to college, and who always had my back.

I’m talking about my corduroy Jansport backpack. The backpack that clung dedicatedly to my shoulders through most of my teenage years. And now it’s heaving a final, exhausted sigh. One of its straps has been knotted so many times that the most dedicated boy scout could never unravel it. An ever-widening hole spreads through the front pocket, and a wad of radio-actively green gum has only been half-heartedly scraped from the back. In short, it’s about to stop completing any of its important roles as a backpack.

It should come as no surprise that I easily attach to inanimate objects. In my bedroom, I still have an entire mesh hammock full of beanie babies. But if I was to build a museum of my life, my backpack would earn its own rotating display case.

I bought it freshman year of high school. Out of all the things I purchased at 14, there are very few I don’t regret. Beyond the heavy eyeliner and My Chemical Romance t-shirts that dominated my freshman year, my backpack waited patiently, knowing it would outlast all the fads.

High school is, in essence, a terrible time. That doesn’t mean that I personally had a terrible in high school. It just means now, two years later, I can recognize that we were all hormonal, pimply, overdramatic teenagers.

In those four years of turning into functioning adults, we wasted a lot of time on trivial things. A favorite activity of my group was taking pictures of ourselves to post on our MySpaces. We definitely weren’t the only teenagers obsessed with photographing ourselves. What is it about being sixteen that causes this frenzy to pout your lips, hold the camera out at arm’s length and snap your own face? Was it a desperate need to prove our own existence, to hold a concrete image of ourselves as our friends, our bodies, our lives changed around us? Or were we just hoping that the perfect default photo would finally make that homeroom hottie notice us?

All through those four years, my backpack hugged my shoulders with constant reassurance. It graciously held my textbooks in the hall, my water bottles at concerts, and my paperbacks on the train. And when I went to college, I packed it to bursting with knickknacks to decorate my dorm shelves with. On my first night of freshman year, when I hung my Harry Potter poster over my bed and worried over the team-building games I’d be forced to play the next day, my backpack waited calm and reassuring on its hook by the door. It’s always been there, silent and useful, and now it’s about to disintegrate for good.

I can’t help but feel this backpack represents me. Six years of an ever-changing array of band pins, iron-on patches, stains and rips—in essence, the entire process of growing up. I’m not sporty nylon, I don’t have a built-in water bottle holder, and I’m no good at hiking or braving the wilderness. I’m corduroy—unassuming and a tad nerdy, a fabric to last through the years.