A Backpacker’s Guide to Packing
You find the backpack that fits,
and fidget as you sit in your room
waiting for the day when you finally fly away
and go somewhere, anywhere.
To live. To experience. To serve. To love.
For you suffer from chronic wanderlust.
Until then, you pack your choicest dreams
and so many useless things, just-in-case,
obsessing over what you’ll probably need,
pushing and stuffing, carrying all of your self on your back.
The excitement of those past comes to you anew
as you see a vastly, exciting, different new truth,
you carry your backpack full of naiveté with buoyant steps,
your head full of places and absolutely no regrets,
colorful country patches, like badges, giving you access
To a club where all are covered in a layer of dirt; a layer of love.
The sights seen, the people met, add,
and every thought seems held together by hostel stickers.
The wonder of what was far gives way to that which was lost,
and the desire of what was near subtracts from your new joy.
You struggle to carry your backpack full of dreams,
now, half-full of noir memories and souvenirs,
as you throw most of the just-in-cases away, anyway.
With a head full of faces, the holes in your heart multiply,
and you cannot stand patches anymore, for they deny the mathematics of wear.
You are here and they are there, and you are Heraclitus;
for you’ve filled your backpack with a river, and you will never go back.
You’ve unpacked yourself in too many places, and some has gotten lost.
Yet, as you pack and re-pack your backpack for the millionth time.
every time, adding weight of thought as the essentials of life get lighter.
You add, multiply, and subtract all that you’ve done and loved,
and find the result that to travel is yet to live.
And to live is yet to love.
So, after wandering afar, you’ve finally come home.
or, at least, what was once home, and the old becomes new again.
As you set your pack down, you seek what is left of the self that once set out,
the patched remains of the past with your tears spill out.
Creature comforts give way to familiar rapport,
as you unpack your backpack full of dreams and memories,
you wonder if you would ever do it again.
