The Things I Carry, Revisited

I wear a thread around my neck, something simple that shows the wear of months and years past. It has seen all that I’ve seen; it keeps my feet planted firmly on the concrete.

I carry the poems of youth who slam their heart out to a small crowd with an electric microphone on a small bland stage in hopes of exciting the mind. I carry the works of Gemini and Rives. They speak in rhythm and rhyme because it frees them, just as it frees me. Poetry can express emotions and paint pictures that I’m confident a video camera could never capture.

I carry a candle that burned through that November night. It was so very cold, but I have never seen people come together like that. In one single motion, we became one single message. This is not how it should be.

I carry coins in that little compartment above the right pants pocket; a strange but also useful habit. I carry intellectual change as well; wishing people would question why it has somehow become un-cool to be confident in your own convictions. As Taylor Mali will tell you, being aware of who you are and being proud of it is not so easy these days.

I carry the secrets of friends and strangers alike. Sometimes the sharp confessionals are planted into me whether I will it or not. These people seek out those who will listen and ask you to answer their questions, caring less about you solving the problem as much as you listening to it. Whether they are secrets of humor or of life changing weight, I keep them equally locked away. My trust is given to them to carry.

I carry lists of my responsibilities for that given week. Nothing is better than crossing off everything on a list. I carry all the things I shouldn’t have said, right then, or all the things I wanted to say, you know, that one time. I carry the sun, assembling on these shoulders, it spits from my tongue as not some sort of song or statement of my thoughts but rather a “How are you?’” or a “You dropped this”.

I carry the hope that when it’s your turn to make a decision like whether to laugh at the kid who’s being harassed or to tell the insecure torturers that it’s time to stop, that you can somehow find it in you to choose the lighter of the two choices. Carry that little gold star from kindergarten that means you did something good that day.
Yeah, elementary school art. Those awful pieces of paper mapped with Crayola crayons that your mom still keeps, that’s what I carry. Marble paintings find their place right next to lunchboxes and those blissful days on the tire swings. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I carry a lot of pencils, and a lot of pictures, and a lot of poor grades on German quizzes, but being able to understand family when they switch mid-sentence into a foreign tongue is nothing less than priceless. What I carry, in these pockets and mind, is nothing less than priceless.