Part 1: Backpack

I wear the backpack Monday through Friday, all day. I either have classes or homework and assignments to do. Essays to complete and exams to study for. I always have the backpack with me with me during the academic week—my notebooks, my folders, my sticky notes, my pens and pencils. When I wake up in the morning, first thing I see is the backpack, next to my bed leaning against the desk on the floor. The desk is wooden; a standard dorm desk. Scattered across my desk are my study materials, and the backpack sits right under the desk, leaning up against it, all zippered up, all the Essays that haunt me are inside of it. I get it ready for the next day so I can grab it and go. The zipper was made in a factory in Indonesia. The zipper unleashes all my writings. I put the backpack on right before I leave to go to class. It weighs the amount of four textbooks. The backpack is a couple of years old, and it has lots of pockets. Pens, pencils, erasers, drafts, sticky notes and notes and assignments become lost in the pockets; it looks like a normal backpack. Inside writings disappear. The zipper from Indonesia is evil. It wants my essays. Inside the backpack, there’s lots of that I have to do. It’s the size of a room, a dark room, no lights—because it’s a black backpack. The room is like a trench; it just keeps going down, a steep trench, like one that you find in the middle of the ocean. It just keeps descending; it has no end, like a black hole. During the day, it acts like a normal backpack, but actually inside, it’s pretty chaotic. All my notebooks become mixed up, notes disappear and climb inside different notes, and my essays are half eaten or erased. By the end of the day, I’m so tired from carrying the backpack, that when I go to look inside, I can’t find anything. It’s become much bigger—it’s a cold basement or a cell.

Part 2: Boulder Assignments

In the Myth of Molly, it feels as though I’m stuck and I can’t move forward. Physically and mentally. I feel it in my back. My shoulders are heavy. Like boulders—two boulders at the top of the hill. They’re large; they’re gray—just big rocks. A steep hill that is grassy—dead grass—patchy. I feel like I’ve been walking for miles with a heavy backpack with all the papers I must do inside— the creative nonfiction (four drafts); geotours; weekly geo news assignments; process notes; and free writes. I see them even though I haven’t started the first one; I see them because I have anxiety. These drafts are blank pieces of paper; they just have the title of the assignment—no words yet—the title the teacher gave for the project. They’re on notebook paper. Other assignments are in my backpack from different courses that I take which also include writing assignments: I’m taking a geology class, and I have to write essays, usually just one to two pages of what’s going on in geology in the real world. One is due every other day; so, I would start one, and then I would see another article I would read about and start writing about that, but then I would realize I hadn’t finished the first one. I would get bored or say, “I want to write about this.” I start them, but then they bore me, and I start something else. In the mental backpack, everyone I’ve done and every one of them that I know I need to do. In my virtual backpack, that’s for professors who require their assignments to be handed in on Canvas, stuff from my first-year seminar resides on canvas  including 1-2-page reflection essays on the experiences we’ve had on actual whale watches; there are the geology news assignments that I had mentioned earlier; and some online quizzes for geology. You have an hour to answer sixty question in a boring college textbook chapter. I have multiple backpacks: one hangs on my right shoulder and that’s my mental backpack. In there is notebooks and folders; whereas my virtual backpack is on my left shoulder, and it’s filled with files and assignments. It has  emails—so Canvas emails you when an assignment is due and when a teacher puts in an assignment, even when it’s due in a month. It makes me anxious because there’s an assignment that’s due but I haven’t finished the one that’s in my mental backpack or virtual backpack. I write everything on Stickie notes, and you know those Stickie notes will pile up. I have Stickie notes in my mental backpack, my virtual backpack, and my real one. They’re also sticking to things, and I’ll find them in random places, and I’ll say, “Oh, I didn’t do that.” Or it was an assignment that I hadn’t enjoyed, and then I get post-writer’s block. I never throw anything away, so I also have an abundance of miscellaneous notes, assignments, or readings that I printed out—unnecessary memories. Whenever I pick something out of my backpack while rummaging around to find the item I need, I may pick up something and recall a feeling about that—or maybe wondering what I received as a grade and whether the grade is on Canvas. An abundance of papers and notes and Stickie notes are swirling around in my backpack and my head. In my virtual backpack, I believe there is also a worm. While I am typing an essay, it will eat my words—so I write something, as I’m writing, it disappears. Letters vanish one by one—as if I’m tapping the backspace.  It’s a computer animated worm and looks like a bug virus you’d see on your screen; it looks digitally animated. It’s just an outline, as if there was a worm. It reminds me of something you would see in a Nintendo 64 game. Bad graphics and so is the worm.  It’s eating my words—it eats all of them—and I can never get anything down. The worm eats my words because he’s a jerk. He’s a bully; he just wants to give me a hard time because I’m struggling with all these assignments. I’m technologically impaired. I’m not very good using my computer, and the worm uses that to his advantage, and he messes with my computer—makes the network not respond. He plans to eat all my stuff so that I fail. He just doesn’t like me because I don’t leave the cookies on my computer for him to eat. Also in my backpacks, my real backpack is Adidas; my virtual backpack is Dell; my emotional backpack is Molly’s Boulders.