The Things I Carry

The things I carry in my backpack are all vital for my everyday life at school: textbooks, notebooks, pencils, pens, P.E. clothes, deodorant, a calculator, my lunch, my headphones and iPod, a stormtrooper keychain, and a Yale University keychain. As eerie as it may seem the keychains, headphones, and iPod fall into the category of vitality because of what they mean to me and what I’d be without them.

The iPod and headphones go with me because music makes up a great portion of my life. Whether I’m sitting in the bus, laying in bed, or doing my homework music has the ability to open my imagination and turn whatever it is that I’m doing into something extraordinary. Snow Patrol can suddenly make my homework into a sad and melancholic situation, Pink Floyd make running a heroic and dead-or-alive act, and AC/DC even make my lunch a very rebellious one. Music is what gets me through any mood and works as a escape route to the world of my favorite bands; a world full of jazzy bass riffs, heavy drumming, hypnotizing guitar solos, and unparalleled vocal abilities. So I choose to “hump” my iPod because it’s my portal to this world, without music my world would not be the same, and surely I wouldn’t be the same. Music is like freedom to me, with it I feel unstoppable.

I carry the keychains with me because they both are a small piece of each of my brothers, Justo (Tito) and Juan Felipe (Pipe). Being the youngest in the family has its advantages, but it also means that eventually you’ll be left without the company of your brothers once they go off to college. I’ve always said that when I was born, it was as if Pipe and Tito were handed a blank block of clay and they began molding me into who I am today; a combination of them both. Because of this, I felt that when they left they took a small piece of me with them, but the keychains they each have given to somewhat replace that gap. Tito gave me a small tiger with a Yale University t-shirt on it the first Christmas we spent together after he’d left for college. He knew a keychain didn’t seem as much of a present, but he still wanted me to carry the one thing that would always remind me of him instantly. Pipe gave me a stormtrooper keychain in the summer of 2011 before he started his senior year at high school. We both knew that although there was no telling which college he was going to yet, he was still not going to stay in Panama while I did. The idea of the stormtrooper came from the days when we used to watch Star Wars together and play Star Wars Battlefront, laughing about how incompetent the enemy soldiers were compared to us. I “hump” these items as if I were “humping” part of my brothers with me, carrying the massive weight of old memories, unconditional love, and their company in the small weight of two keychains strapped to my school backpack.