Story by María Garcia Juanes📍Utrecht
“Will I miss my bed sheets?”
Packing the three cardboard boxes that I need to deliver back to Spain from my rental room in Utrecht, I can’t help but look back at my neat king-sized bed and the sheets covering it. They are of the most uninteresting and common kind, patterned and beige, bought at Ikea from the cheapest bed sheet section, but I’ve been sleeping in them for the past eight months and I’ve gotten used to how they feel against my skin.
This makes me think back to the horrendous bed sheets I owned some years ago, when I studied in Shanghai — a sickening shade of green with pink flowers all over it — and how during the first few months back home in Spain I longed to lay on them one more time instead of having to resort to my decaying memory of them. Will I regret not making space for these bed sheets among all the other objects that together form the home I made for myself here?
I’m reminded of the first time I came across the realization that I could carry everything I needed over my shoulders — in just one 40L Decathlon backpack, to be precise. The first time I did this was in the summer between the last year of school and the first year of university, when I fussed over all sorts of items I thought I needed for my two-week trek — from clothes to medicines to sleeping bags and books. Although short-lived, the experience was my first taste of a different way of living: simple and free of superfluous attachments. If I needed a shower, I’d open my backpack and locate the small bag meticulously placed on its side where all my toiletries were. There, next to the toothpaste samples would be the small soap bottle that served as shampoo, conditioner and body wash all in one, that I’d have to ration for the days ahead. For some reason, the idea of squeezing the shit out of that soap bottle seemed to make more sense than that of visiting a supermarket to get new supplies. The value of the items I carried in that small bag was transformed, as if instead of being easy to replace I could finally appreciate what each of them was able to provide for me.
It was a funny feeling how what I carried always seemed to be enough: a pair of boots, torn-apart flip-flops, and three t-shirts being perfectly reasonable to get by, whereas back home all the jackets and coats and jeans and dresses gathering dust in my closet never were. How my first instinct wouldn’t be that of acquiring more items, but to ponder if their weight was worth it first.
Whether it’s for a few days, weeks, months, or even years, experiencing this shows just how uncomplicated life can be from a material standpoint, and exposes the very reason for carrying as little as possible: to ease your way into new places yet to be discovered; to focus on the world we share and not what we individually own; to follow the path to the next river, the next mountain, the next shore, unencumbered by the weight of things. It allows us to make strategic stops along the way while we flow through the rapid current that our lives are.
Back in this room in Utrecht, I keep carefully wrapping jackets, jeans, and coats as I wonder what to do with them. A closet full of garments is waiting for me in Madrid: more and more of the same. ‘At least a great part of the new things I own here were acquired second-hand’ I think. But that doesn’t make the two boxes in front of me less full — and for now, that’s only books and winter coats.
I think of that backpack I used to carry over my shoulders, and what I would choose to carry in it if I were to leave this place this very second.
But the backpack is already quite full, and not precisely of things. It’s stained with the sweat of hot summer days, of long walks to reach the next destination, of tears shed at airports or in moments I felt cold or hungry or lost. When I look at it, I see the lessons I was forced to learn and the shadow of memories left by special people I once met and have yet to meet again.
I don’t live in the things I own. I live in the things I experience. Right here at the skin level.
Surrounded as I am by more than I can take in, I forget that the bedsheets are not the kind of thing I should make sure to carry with me, but the nights spent under them and the days that left me so tired I didn’t want to leave them. I’ll carry the evenings spent sipping beers next to canals, watching the sun shower the grass in a deep orange hue; the laughs of dear friends that spontaneously gather to cook dinner together and play nameless card games; the joyful days and the hard ones; the impromptu projects and jobs, and the lessons they taught me that I didn’t know I didn’t know; the hours invested working and daydreaming about the future ahead; the discovery of new hobbies that made muscle pain feel blissful; the actual pieces that together form what the past two years have been and how they’ve inadvertently altered the course of me.
I’m wrapped in them like I would in those bed sheets. This is the kind of baggage I want to take with me.
