LANDFILL OR LEGACY?

I’d like to think my legacy is in the things I keep, but most of them belong in landfills. In seventh grade, on my best friend’s birthday, my class took a field trip to Universal Studios. I still have the bag from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter gift shop. I don’t remember what I actually bought that day, but I can picture that seemingly insignificant plastic bag with perfect clarity. I have every birthday card I have ever been given, even the cheap drugstore ones for which the corresponding birthday I cannot even remember but kept nonetheless. I think of myself as a sentimental person. I keep everything people who love me have gifted me. They thought of me and I think of them when I look back through my collection of things. I’ve never been able to bring myself to throw away the love poems my first girlfriend wrote me, though that envelope is always opened with extreme caution. I kept the t-shirts from every event, even some I didn’t attend! But I tell myself I will just add the shirt to my bin in case, one day, I actually want my grandmother to make that t-shirt quilt we’ve been talking about for ages. I won’t. I know this. The thought of cutting up any of those memories is too horrid to stomach, even to make them into something more practical. I would rather let them gather dust and laugh once a year at the idea that I used to be small enough to fit in those tiny dance recital shirts. It’s through this cotton collection, through the nameless birthday cards that I count the months and feel the years that have passed by. I have never grown an inch in my own eyes, but the sun rises and sets, and in the meantime, I’ve grown out of a youth small.

My mother says I am a hoarder. She’s kidding, kind of. I know she sees these precious mementos of mine as just things taking up space in her guest closet. Things I will never do anything with. I know she secretly hopes one day I grow out of this phase of keeping. I do not think that will be the case. I will always be a keeper. It’s these things that remind me of the joy that once lived on my face, of the smile that left my cheeks aching. If I hold these things close enough to my skin, they can bring back that moment as if it was happening right then. They can resurface the warm feeling in my chest, and I cannot throw away that.

I have found that legacies matter less to people when we do not know where we are from. When we cannot point to a country on the globe, a place on the map, and claim that culture as ours. My dad’s mother sent me a DNA-testing kit once several years ago. Even if you asked, I still cannot recite to you my own origins. The results were unmemorable and meaningless. 23andMe cannot hand you a legacy. Supposedly, that is imparted to you through your family’s traditions, the history in their doings and behaviors.

My entire extended family is a big fan of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels because my grandfather graduated from there in some year with some degree, two details I also cannot remember for a lack of being engraved on my memory. Is that my legacy? It’s an accomplishment that doesn’t even belong to me.

But standing in that Universal Studios gift shop, sweating and exhausted next to my best friends, baking in the Florida sun with pure joy flowing through my veins is a moment that belonged only to me. And that will always feel more important to my legacy. So I kept the bag.

WRITER SHELBY JENKINS GRAPHIC DESIGNER EMMA PETERSON