What Whitney Contained:
Whitney is the name of my backpack—I did not name her, she came with it embroidered upon her upper flap. Though chronically overweight, she is beautiful as a backpack is when capable of embodying freedom, of containing a life and remaining reliably manageable, even light, upon my shoulders. At her heaviest, I humped her up Bear Mountain in California with no water, across Kota in Rajasthani heat, through rattlesnake sandcanyons in Arizona. Hers was the only geography that matched my own. For a time long enough to be entirely significant, she was what I called home. She was eternally balanced; I never doubted that I could shoulder her weight alone, and so I never doubted myself alone.
She bore all the weight of bad planning and arrogant packing. Boots in the city, coats and a sleeping bag in the heat, a tent in suburbia. She housed a chaotic library of obscure poets and epics, sacred texts, canons of Beatnik nostalgia, comic books, Infinite Jest and Upanisads. Why did I carry a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow so far when I had already finished with it entirely? Did the British leave their bibles behind? Not to mention folders of papers I dreamed of as books, bound but unedited, the raw nonsense of roadside solitude; not to mention the boots I wished could write books on my behalf, they having been closer to the ground.
She contained my Machine: a full size black USB keyboard and a nonprofit green toy laptop; all that she contained looked childish; purple pants and peanut butter, a bite-sized pillow with mosquitoes on it; most of my gear young gifts from a mother who didn’t realize how they would be used.
She contained a constantly rotating menagerie of mementoes and artifacts; out of Tucson, a beaded belt, out of California a box of condoms, out of Maine a single tile—a last place trophy in a canoe race—out of Seattle a new razor, out of Boulder, Parmesan cheese and bookmarks made of flowers, out of Calcutta, clothbound books, out of Orissa, ganja, out of Bangkok, an unwanted tattoo (I blame her), out of Calcutta again all the art I could eat, and always stones, pebbles that rattled in various pockets; from her belly, gifts re-pollinated across vast distances, from her womb chocolate was born and eaten,
My knives slept in outside pockets—I always knew how long it might take me to reach them, but never did, except frequently for mangoes. Clean water tablets and antibiotics littered throughout—never used, proudly. Unwrinkled shirts were wrapped in packing cubes, reserved for interviews and intellectual moments: with Whitney to dress me, I was no vagrant.
I was no vagrant; she always had a pillow for my head and sheets for my bed—what else is a home? With her, I was no nostalgic hobo, with her, I remained a student, with her, I remained alone. I did nothing alone, went nowhere alone: I had support, security, and she was that, all that, and yet purely material; and so I was ashamed to be seen with her; I saw envy on the faces of fellow hippies and mendicants, who rightly saw my wealth in her, saw the blessings of my American birth in her, the true ease of my journey, the fact of my fleeting and willful homelessness, the inescapability of my material attachment: the certainty that I carried karmas, the uncertainty of what they are, seen also in the constant need for Internet, to be able to be present in two places, one of which could be anywhere at all, and in the other I was not alone.
Ah, Whitney, what a pleasant fatness you are, even in your current emaciation above my closet; what a sign you have become in your absence; I have put you down at least for two years, but I do not know whether I want to pick you up again.