I try to save you but I can'tI was waiting to fill my backpack. A good book, a drawing pad and a few pencils. My favorite jeans and clean shirts and a warm sweater with a hood. A rain shell and a wooden comb. A tiny box to hold my hairpins and my ring while I sleep. My violin case lashed to the front of the pack for when I play and a jacknife dangles from one of Jake's old carabiners. There's a forgotten house key at the bottom of the pack and if I'm lucky a granola bar with chocolate chips.
Find the answer
I'm holding on to you
I'll never let go
My phone is in my pocket with my headphones and my glasses are on my face. They're spotted with rain and smudgy but I haven't noticed yet. Hearing aids, check. I'm wondering if I should wear two braids or one or just tie a knot at my neck and let my hair go halo like it always does. Starting out combed smooth and then escaping in wisps all throughout the day until I look like a lunatic at dinner. And shoes. I'll never be able to pick shoes but if I had any say it would be the FiveFingers, though I'll probably be vetoed in favor of something with ankle support for the hard parts.
From here on out it's food/sleep/comfort/experience. Or so I expected, in the beginning. The endurance race that I put off forever, delaying, never starting out for fear of going to the wrong place with the wrong people, or maybe hating it. The perpetual gap year that somehow got lost in a shuffle of appointments for tires and bloodwork, homework, grocery lists and clean sinks.
It wasn't mandatory and I've found that what I thought I needed in my pack isn't enough for any more than a year proper anyway. It just isn't.
And so on this long weekend at the farm I didn't pack sparingly, and I didn't pack like a college student going on the life-changing trek.
I packed like a mom, and a hurting one at that. A magic bag. Iodine, because we always get great ghastly splinters in the barn and on the split-rail fences by the paddock. The book Ben got for me, The Time Traveler's Wife, because I read like a hungry masochist, such inappropriate things and he's not a slave to herstory, as he says. Cappuccino! Because I still need caffeine in the morning or I'm going to become a social pariah, nodding off when I should be sparkling. Warm socks because at night my feet get cold and let me tell you, I look damn cute buck naked with striped blue, purple, and green fuzzy knee socks on.
Okay, so maybe I packed like an aging stripper. My point is it's not about the big trip, the once in a lifetime adventure, no sir. It's about the little things. The little things like the cherry lipgloss I brought because it was in the pocket of my bag with my keys. Ben ate it this morning but promised to replace it when we go back to the city on Sunday. I got a little thrill that shivered up my spine with the promise of a trip to the drugstore where they have a wall of lipgloss for people with the same kind of weird tactile addiction to tubes full of glittery fake-flavored chemicals that I have.
I might be really adventurous and try the papaya one. Who knows? The world is my oyster, after all, and the experience of that will count for everything in the end.
Peach, definitely. Or maybe strawberry.
Okay, strawberry.
Tangerine?
I'll have to let you know. I can't make up my mind.