The Things I Carry

Brooke Terry
Barnes, 1
The Things They Carried

She carries the usual things; a back pack full of binders and textbooks. She tries to only carry the bare minimum, always seeming to leave something in her car, at her house or at her gym. Like the average teenage girl, she carries her phone, her makeup, her perfume, her brush, and of course her shallow appearance based judgments. She carries the lighthearted gossip she shared with her teammates about a random moment in last night’s episode of Dance Moms. She carries the heavier tension caused by the drama buried deep in the roots of her ‘not-so-ordinary’ family. She carries binders full of half-finished assignments that really should have been done this morning. She carries the guilt of the conscience decision to put gymnastics before school. She doesn’t feel as though she really has a choice in that, the expectations put on her by her coaches, her parents, but mostly herself seem to be far too high for any sane human being to take on, and they’re still growing. She carries her gym bag, full of grips, therabands, powerbars, the half-full bottle of advil, and it’s other half scattered at the bottom of the bag. She carries her heavy body; seemingly dead from the practice she dragged herself to the night before. She carries her fear of being late; something that seems to happen far too often. She carries her love for food, clothes, and reality TV. She carries the typical new student stresses and insecurities, the things everyone else takes so lightly often mean the world to her. She tries fairly hard to seem tough when in reality the smallest things could easily crush her. She puts too much pressure on herself, or at least that’s what she is told. She has inadvertently created a ticking time bomb out of her body and she is ready to explode. She carries an odd paranoia of people, a fear that they are all as fake as some, a fear that they will all make a joke at her expense, a fear that she is not entirely sure of where it came from, but also a fear that she hasn’t been able to shake since third grade.