Pattern: Simple, Complex
Prompt: What is your most indispensable possession, and why?
In my 42 years of living I have acquired many things. While I like most of my possessions, I’d be okay if most of them burned. In fact, the only material item I’d run into my house to retrieve if it were burning to the ground would be my acoustic guitar. Although it’s not my most used or valuable possession, it’s my most indispensable. I’d be crushed if I had to part ways from it.
I got that guitar, a basic Yamaha six-string, when I was in college, which was a turbulent period of time for me. In my sophomore year, my younger sister died after being in a car crash a mile from my family’s house on Nichols Avenue in Stratford on a cold and rainy Friday in early November. While this tragedy obviously changed everything about my life and my family’s, I attempted to return to the life I had been living before the accident by returning to college as quickly as I could. Returning home a month later for Christmas break was obviously heart-wrenching.
During one of those nights I found myself in my sister’s room, which was left exactly how she’d left it that Friday night in November. In a corner of her room was the guitar she’d just begun learning to play. Because it was there and hers and I wanted to learn, too, I took it into my room across the top of the stairs. My dad knew how to play and taught me a few things.
I returned to college with that guitar and played when I could, although it was hard to find the time. But I stayed with it. When I returned home for the summer, my parents saw that I was serious about wanting to become a guitar-player. On my twentieth birthday, they bought me the Yamaha I still play to this day.
Because it has been with me all these years, through my worst and best days, it is my most indispensable possession not because it is essential to my living on a daily basis but because it is essential to my being the person I am today. Without it I would be without the thing that most connects me still to my long-gone sister, Erin.
