The pockets of my backpack were still where I left them, but the fabric felt wrong. Lighter. I ran my hand over the front and my stomach dropped. Eleven patches were gone.
Clean cuts, like someone had used a knife. I woke Jacob up, already shaking. “What happened to my bag? ”
He barely looked at me.
He told me that after I’d gone to bed, three of his friends texted him from a nearby bar, and he invited them to come over. One of them saw my backpack on the living room floor and said it was cool. And Jacob told them they could have some patches if they wanted. They cut them off with a pocket knife and left holes in the fabric.
I couldn’t breathe. Those patches were everything. I’d started the bag when I was fourteen, and I’d been sewing on pieces of my life ever since. Concerts, plays, cities I’d studied in, money I didn’t have.
Gifts from people I loved. Four of them were from my dad. He died last year. He’d loved helping me find patches and had bought me three limited-release ones you can’t even buy anymore, plus one he’d kept since 1994.
All four were gone. I flipped out. I screamed “what were you thinking” until my voice cracked. I told him to call his friends and get everything back.
He said he would for the ones from my dad, but that he’d look like a jerk if he asked for the rest that “didn’t mean as much. ”
“Do you care more about looking bad to them than you do about me? ” I asked. He hesitated.
I told him to leave. I contacted the people I knew had been over. One of them, a mutual friend, brought two patches back that night. He said he thought it was weird when Jacob offered, but he’d gone along with it.
He apologized. I still had nine missing. I texted Jacob. I asked him when he was getting my dad’s patches back.
He said he’d contact the others on the weekend. The weekend. He didn’t apologize. He just wanted me to be less mad without fixing anything.
“You’re overreacting,” he said. “You had so many, I didn’t think you’d mind. ”
I’d given patches to people before, sure, but those were ones I had bought specifically as gifts at shows or online. Never from my own backpack.
He saw me carry that bag every day. A month into dating, he’d asked me to tell him the story behind each patch. He knew what it meant. I told my friends I wanted to break up.
Two of them said I was being dramatic, that patches were cheap and I should just forgive him and move on. They didn’t get it. It isn’t about the price of a patch. He invited people into my home while I slept and let them physically cut pieces of my history off the bag I carry every single day.
My dad’s patches. The ones he gave me when I was fourteen. Gone. I told the mutual friend who had returned the first two patches.
He had the number of another person who had been there and promised to message him. The other three people were from Jacob’s college circle, so I started searching for them on Facebook. Then, a call. The second mutual friend had two of my patches.
He returned them that weekend. One of them was my dad’s. That brought it down to seven missing. I wasn’t about to wait for Jacob to fix something he broke.
I knew if I didn’t handle it myself, those patches might never come back. I showed up at a few doors. I brought a friend with me. I looked people in the eyes and said, “You have a patch that my dead father gave me when I was fourteen.
”
It worked. Every single time. All of my patches came back. People blamed Jacob.
I did, too. He never really apologized. He just wanted me to stop being angry. So I stopped hiding it.
I told everyone what he did. He hated that, but I didn’t care. If you don’t want people to know what you did, don’t do it. Some of my friends apologized for taking his side, but our friendships were never the same after that.
Months later, maybe a year, my sister and I were clearing out a storage unit that used to belong to my dad. We found one of his old backpacks. Nothing special. Just a JanSport.
I cleaned it out, and I moved all my patches onto it. It’s the base I still carry today. I’ve added new patches since. I learned something through all of it.
My ex wasn’t laid-back. He just didn’t care. Those aren’t the same thing.
