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By Anonymous, ’24. Essay.

I travel light. The only things I would ever need on almost any trip would be my wallet, my necklace, my phone, and of course a couple changes of clothes. But that’s basically it. Granted I don’t travel a lot, but when I do, I never end up using the countless leisure items stashed away in my suitcase or backpack. Obviously having a few more items would make my life easier, but if I had to get on a plane right now, those 3 would be the first things I’d be sure to grab. My wallet has a sentimental value to me, aside from its intended purpose. It’s my grandfather’s old one, from the 80s. It’s not anything crazy, simple leather and a clear plastic ID display, from Walmart. It’s a nice enough wallet, and it’s served me well for the 3 year’s it’s been mine. Big and bulky, it fits all my cards, identification, my license and on the rare occasion that I have some, cash. But it has so much history. I imagine if you held it to your nose and inhaled, it would smell like a logging truck, my grandfather’s summer job as a teen. Like timber and diesel and sweat. Or maybe like a classroom, whatever a classroom smell is. A Colorado highschool classroom. A suburb of Denver. It may smell like alcohol, or stagnation. But of all the possible smells it may very well smell like, it probably just smells of cheap leather. To be honest, he never even had the wallet until he was a math teacher. He barely even used it. The heaviest thing I carry in that wallet are my grandfather’s memories. Before he ended up in an unhappy marriage, before he had to give up his dreams and become a teacher. When he was young, fresh out of high school with the whole world in front of him. In that wallet I carry promise.

In that wallet I also carry my license. A license doesn’t seem that important, but the journey I went through to get that license will stay with me forever. When I think about driving, the first memory that comes to mind is sitting on my dad’s lap when I was 7, and steering the car through a national forest in Colorado. Or my first time driving on a highway ever. That was the summer of ‘22 in Monterrey. I’d been going to drivers ed in the United States, but driving in Mexico was a whole other beast. There, big container trucks drove in the left lanes, blinkers were nonexistent, and the speed limit was a minimum.

My dad had drunk a little too much at the family gathering, and we needed to get
back to the house we were staying in.

“Ey Alden, ¿puedes manejar hasta la casa? Te puedo guiar.” He told me. I didn’t have too much confidence in the directions he would give me, so I loaded up google maps just in case. We started off, making our way down winding unfamiliar streets. Eyes looked out at us from just beyond the streetlights, and groups of men sat on the edge of sidewalks, on little plastic chairs, sipping Tecate, Modelos, Barrilitos, and other various beers and inebriating substances. My dad was in the passenger’s seat of the minivan, eyes barely open.

“Dale a la derecha en el semáforo.” He said pointing at the street light. When I turned right like he asked me he let out a little yelp. “Te dije a la izquierda pendejo, que no me escuchas o que?!” No matter how many times I tried explaining to him that no, he had indeed told me to turn right at the light, he still insisted that he said left.

But none of that mattered now. The only way was forward, the road too narrow to turn back around. The wall next to me seemed to grow in height, and my heart began pounding. We were on the onramp to La Carretera Nacional, one of the biggest highways in Monterrey. My dad quietly muttered to himself in the passenger seat, the only phrases I could occasionally pick out were things somewhere along the lines of we were going to die, I’d wreck the car, or that I wasn’t ready. Oh I was ready buddy. I pushed down hard on the gas, and the car took off. In no time I was going 40, 50, 60, 70 all the way to 80 miles per hour. My dad closed his eyes and tried to look away from the road. At this point I was only going off of google. Despite my dads misgivings, I made it through without a scratch to the body work, finally convincing him to let me go for my road test. The setting sun glistened off of the skyscrapers scattered about downtown.

That skyline has changed so much since then. When I was back in Monterrey this Thanksgiving there were almost double the amount of skyscrapers that had been there only 1 year ago. My uncle told me that a lot of them are empty, functioning as massive money laundering operations for the cartels. From a distance, they seem smaller given how spread out they are, but up close and under them, they tower over the shacks and shanties of the poor, giving a very vivid representation of the stark wealth divide in Mexico. But all those buildings fade away when you enter Los Puesteros Del Colegio Civil, one of the largest open air markets in Monterrey. Everything melts down to ground level, the throngs of people and the smell of street food fills the air, a scent so heavy it feels like it has its own gravitational pull. The streets would be considered dirty anywhere else, but here they’re like a canvas, telling the story of thousands of feet walking through here, daily. Though the streets are wide, the market stalls press in on you, constricting your view even further. The people too. So many people. Times Square has nothing on Los Puesteros. The only individuals you can actually make out and distinguish are those within 5 feet of you. Past that, everyone blends into a shapeless mass of flesh, shirts here, arms there, occasional heads turned towards vendors hawking their wares. The same pre recorded line sounds out from many of the stalls, barely making it over the sounds of the mob.

“El patrón se volvió loco, paselepaselepasele. 12 calcetines por 100 pesos, paselepaselepasele!” repeating until infinity. I turned away from the stand, ready to move on. My dad effortlessly maneuvered his way through the crowd, looking as if he was part liquid, flowing through the people. I tried my best to keep up, bumping into people here, tripping over cables there. I was a broken record, spouting off the same “Perdon,” “Compermiso,” “Lo siento,” every 5 seconds. I was like a foreign bacteria moving through a body, making my way through unfamiliar arteries of people and cheap goods. My dad leaned out and pulled me into a building, into one of the indoor markets. On the outside, these 2 story cement brick and stucco warehouse looking structures didn’t seem too big. But once you got inside it was as if you stepped into a tesseract, the inside folding out into a labyrinth of rooms, shops, and so many different items. From knives and guns, to little knock off action figures based on popular internet trends. That was the only place I’d ever seen a skibidi toilet doll. Walking further into the building we stumbled on a whole area just selling fake jordans. I spent a little time looking at them but decided against it. Then, through the chaos and loud music, I saw a little jewelry spot. Necklaces and earrings glittered in the LED lights. Walking over a little silver chain caught my attention.

It was simple, yes, but it was well made. I walked out of that building with my neck 10 dollars heavier than when I walked in. I love that necklace, almost always putting it on before leaving the house. I take care to always keep it off when I take a shower, and always put it back on my shelf at night. It’s become a sort of morning ritual of mine. I get up, unplug my phone from the charger, put on my pants and shirt, put my wallet in my pocket and my necklace over everything, tucking it under my hoodie. Though these items may not be unique in the material, nor the brand, nor the craftsmanship, each one of them is mine, and each is unique through the memories I have because of them. I could never replace the experiences I have with these items. These are the things I carry.