Gabriela Vargas                                                                                        

                                             Experimental Autobiography Project

I bought my coach tabby shoulder bag with money that didn’t feel like itwas mine at first.

Not because i didn’t earn it i did. Every shift, everylate night every moment i wanted to quit but didn’t. Still, when i Stood at the register holding the bag, I remember thinking, people like me don’t just buy things like this. Not without reason.

So i made one.

I told myself it would be the thing i carried into a better version of my life. Something steady. Something that didn’t fall apart just because everything else did.

At first, it just held normal things like my wallet, my phone, a set of keys that never stayed the same for long. Different doors,Diffrent places, Different versions of what i thought “home” was supposed to feel like.

There were nights i walked longer routes just to clear my head, the strap digging into my shoulder as i moved through streets that didn’t feel like they belonged to me yet. I’d pass the same corners, the same dim lights, wandering how long it would take before i stopped feeling like i was just passing through my own life.

The bag went every where without me.

It sat next to me on bus rides where i stared out the windows, replaying conversations i wished had gone differently. It rested against my side in rooms that felt too small for all the tension in them. It carried things i didn’t talk about like receipts from days i barely got through, notes i wrote to myself and never read again.

I started noticing how worn it was getting.

The leather sosftened where my hands always grabbed it. The edges darkened from being held too tight, too often. It didn’t look brand new anymore.

But neither did i.

Somewhere between the old environments i kept walking away from and the new ones i was trying to step into, I realized the bag wasn’t a symbole of becoming someone else.

I paid for it myself. I carried it through every version of “almost there” and “not quite enough”. It stayed when other things didn’t.

Now, when i pick it up, it doesn’t feel like something i had to justify owning.

I feels like something that kept up with me.

And maybe thats what i needed all along not something to change my life, but something that could move with me while i changed it myself.