The things I carry

I firmly believe that all you really have to do to get to know someone is to look through their bag (with consent, of course). The contents of a college student’s backpack tend to be fairly uniform: a water bottle, lunch (maybe), pens, pencils, an iPad — but the weight of those objects is not immediately visible to an outside observer.  

Take mine, for example.

To every class, I carry my black leather laptop bag from Tumi with the gold accents, a "Welcome to Hopkins" gift from my parents, who were the only reason I made it here in the first place. With it, I carry their decades of hard work, the weight of living up to the promise of two brave immigrants, the baggage of living 1,345 miles away from my home for 10 months of the year.  

I carry my new pastel purple water bottle, though I used to carry a black one, heavily dented from slipping out of my hands about a hundred thousand times. I carry what I like to call the "college essentials" — my Mac, my iPad, the 0.5B black and blue G2 ballpoint pens I've been using since I was 15, pastel shades of the trendy Muji highlighters and a small journal that contains my entire life, which I bought in Malvern, Pennsylvania on a weekend trip to visit my best friend in the whole world. 

But when I don’t have classes, I’m a tote bag girl. I carry the green and beige tote with multiple pockets for big meetings or long day trips. But on all other occasions, I carry my favorite: beige with a gradient of blue stripes and printed lettering that reads “My Weekend is Book-ed,” a gift from friends I haven’t spoken to in a year. I carry my favorite Burt’s Bees tinted lip shine and the same journal with a black G2 pen. And above all, I always carry a snack: my chocolate-covered espresso beans or motichoor laddoo I brought back from India, and mango juice to drink. 

Around my neck, an observer would see a leather choker with a pink seashell fragment, a gift from an old friend. Or a silver chain — but not the pendants hidden under my shirt. They wouldn't see the teardrop pendant from my mom and the silver Saturn-shaped pendant that matches my best friend back home, inspired by "Love you to the moon and to Saturn" from Seven by Taylor Swift. 

If someone were to inspect my bag, they would see a 3D-printed white penguin on a keychain, one that perfectly matches the “penguin-holding-a-gun” sticker on my laptop. It becomes even more special when one discovers that the sticker is from a pop-up cafe hosted by one of my best friends — strange, isn’t it? That a plastic penguin has now become a symbol of one of my favorite people, who always greets my friends and me with snacks and a new drink he wants me to taste-test for his menu.

They’d see a blue 3D-printed frog attached to a broken chain, the first handmade gift I remember receiving. They would see the back of my phone in its clear case patterned with wildflowers, and if they squinted at the Polaroid,  behind the case, they would see my roommate and me smiling in a picture taken on the first day of our second year living together. They would see the book that's always hidden in my bag, a different one every week — last week, it was Anne of Green Gables, a book I first read years ago and reread every fall to remember the magic of a made-up world.  They would see a box of green tea mints from Trader Joe’s, which I discovered with my high school best friends on our weekly trips to the shopping center in the Arboretum, and have been obsessed with ever since. 

So do you see, reader? Memories, hope, love, loss — all contained in a bag. The objects contained in any college student’s backpack resemble pieces of themselves. To me, every object in my own bag is a reminder that I carry more of myself than I realize. Who I am can fit into something that I can sling over my shoulder.

Shreya Tiwari is a junior majoring in Biomedical Engineering from Austin, TX.