The Storage Essay
BY JACOB HIBBARD
In the storage closet, in what used to be your childhood bedroom, I find your Time of Death. I find the clothes worn. Toxicology report. A small geometrical abstraction on the corner of a Ken Kesey novel. Not far is a bunched up graduation gown. The same one worn in the photo on our parents’ mantle. I find little beads, pieces of string, things you could make a necklace out of. A school binder of Magic the Gathering cards stolen from Lake Forest Mall. And thumbtacks in a tackle box. Marbled notebooks with jottings, doodles, poetry, journal entries, frayed margins of ripped out pages, gone.
I find a polaroid in an M.C. Escher postcard book of our family sitting on stones where grass is still green at our bent legs. Dad beginning to let air go from his nose. Mom relieved to have corralled the boys into this captured moment. Me hugging my knees, unconcerned, even bored, as you hide inside a half smile, amused at my mumbled complaints toward family pictures, or a rib nudge from our dad, or something unspoken kept to yourself, floating by in your head.
To be holding the photo points to a past effort that makes the photo possible, that makes the holding possible. I think of our mom driving in the rain and handing a cartridge of film to a stranger in a blue shirt, entrusting them with memories in an effort not to forget them. Not forgetting the time a picture needs to become a picture. Negatives gripped by tongs and dipped into developer-liquid that make the invisible visible. And curtained off dark rooms. And minimum wage employment. Mass production of memories. That our mom had to drop off the roll of film and then come back, allowing space and time for development to take place. I think about what it must have been like to slip fresh photos in a purse, drive back through the rain, spread them out on the TV room carpet, or the kitchen table, and return to a recent past. And not forgetting the person behind the camera, photographing the ocean behind you, in one of the many ocean photos saved. Somebody sitting in one of those beach chairs that sink deeper and deeper into the sand the longer one sits, inspired to wiggle out from the hole they dug, grab the camera, and say, “hey,” as they put you into focus.
And I suppose my rummaging is an effort to focus. To discover new angles. To keep movement alive by bringing objects out of forever places and witness the impact of time and loss, and loss of time. One only needs to drive a few miles before running into Life Storage compounds or Extra Space billboards, or parking spaces occupied by a Storage Pod, to know that storage is big business. One needs only to walk around The Container Store to get a sense of the human impulse of storing. And I don’t exactly know what to make of this besides that people in this country are unwilling to part with a lot of things. Or that a lot of us are overflowing with what we have no use for. Or that we live between one home and another, so our storage does too. Not forgetting the reality TV Show Storage Wars, where storage is passion, livelihood, competition, and a means to capitalize by holding our attention through cliffhangers that revolve around what is forgotten about in locked containers. Not to say this is a show you or I watched much, but it points to a kind of suspense storage holds, or a mystery to what hasn’t yet been found, but what could, if we are wanting to look.
Sitting halfway in your closet, halfway out, I recover poems you once wrote. Ones reliant on the binaries of lightness and darkness, of your “aching heart” in a “starry night” and notes that share plans to do oxycontin with a girl in a photo booth reel, where her face, from one still to the next, smiles, frowns, puckers, and kisses you. A composition notebook too, with six or seven entries that ends with the banking information of the photo strip girl with a couple different pin numbers pointing to something possibly more desperate. I recover letters from rehab in South Florida with “get well soon” language, where our mom said things like “I’m proud of you” and our dad said, “It’s an important step in the right direction.” And me too, chiming in, writing from my workplace in Alaska you never got to visit, saying “This is a good thing. You’re doing a good thing,” omitting specific details one might appreciate when stuck in a place that stores your possessions to enforce “good behavior” or that grants “permission” to leave the premises. These letters I hold, feeling rather unhelpful now that you’re gone.
I find a tiny box made of sea shells with a red velvet interior holding the brittle leaf of autumn. To touch the leaf is to touch an effort of preservation. I am reminded of coffins where bodies lie in an effort to put off decomposition. And I’m reminded of permafrost in the Alaskan tundra that keeps bison corpses intact. I blow into a dusty harmonica found in a blue pencil pouch stored with the Oshkosh Sawdust Days pin of 1957. I weigh a velvet bag of marbles in my palm. I flip a karuna from our parents trip to Prague and see what side it lands on. I open a shoe box and recover pennies flattened by a penny press. Within the seeking is the keeping—the re-storing in an orange backpack I once lived out of in a three season tent where I learned to sleep with eye covers amid endless arctic sun. “Keeping” as in to “hold again” and I am reminded of the effort that ensured your 7th grade diary survives, presenting in real time these words:
“Robbie Smith is the dirtiest boy because he cusses more than he says words.”
“I sat next to a girl I like today.”
“My little brother thinks he’s so cool but really he’s the biggest dork.”
Finding the title “little brother,” I am reminded of the child who escaped boredom by putting hands on what wasn’t mine. Sneaking behind our family to open mom’s jewelry box and try on her pearls, or rifling dads top drawer, flicking his lighters, wielding a jagged knife. Or sneaking through your things, holding and unfurling your t-shirts, seeking what you did not want me to find: candy, money, cassette tapes. That forbidden feeling now hidden inside the closet, alongside your voice on pages that survived two decades to be here.
I then go a little further into storage. A little deeper. I flip open a Chewbacca Pez dispenser, half hoping a cherry brick slips from the aliens mouth to remind me again of the sweetness that was fleeting, but potent enough to kill a few seconds of my life. I hold to the light a naked photo of the photo strip girl found in a tin box that once kept sugar cookies, alongside various letters where she called you “Pooh Bear.” Guilt housed in the finding, as it is housed in the essay, stored among words, stored among my own pursuit of recovery.
But guilt is so fleeting, overwhelmed by an object’s ability to transport. Plus, these things have no body to claim them. So I fill up my backpack because charley horses only exist in memory placing a doodle of a wrinkled eye with a bent out paper clip once needed to scrape bong resin, with the the autograph from David Robinson when he said to our mom, “it’s nice to look a woman in the eyes.” And art class projects. Elephants who speak through bubbles you drew when math class became too boring or complex. And photos of family members on a pontoon boat, of our boyish bodies stomach down on carpeting, with a bowl of popcorn at our noses. I keep your inquisitive baby face smeared with chocolate icing when I wasn’t alive, when I was merely a hypothetical. I keep words written in pen that house the “the little brother” I keep stored inside me, among the blood and the bone, in the ribcage, or deeper.
And it goes without saying that bodies are not made from material that keeps the spine of a book to its pages. Or the synthetics that keeps a Pez Dispenser unblemished amid passing decades. Understanding that my own death is certain, the future of your storage—what is left of it—will one day be out of my hands. If I make a point to tell my son to keep these things forever, he will be your storage’s inheritor. If I ask him to live with these things, and pass it down to his child, then perhaps his child will say the same to their child, and so and so forth. But eventually storage is no longer stored. Eventually our things lose the sentiment and importance and end up out in front of houses, in driveways, on tables with price tags, or in landfills designed to store trash, or try to eliminate it. Thus storage is always on the verge of becoming trash, or somebody else’s. So maybe by the time my child’s child’s child finds the wrinkled eye, the earth will already be filled to the brim with the things we all kept but couldn’t burn, recycle, or get rid of. And this child further in time will then place your things into a vessel that launches storage out into orbit–as it will be the only solution left to our addiction of holding on.
Even amid the inhabitable future of the planet, it’s nice to think that your Chewbaca Pez dispenser could outpace humanity, careen beyond the atmosphere alongside the endless keeping done on this planet, having one last shot at encountering other life forms, or entering a black hole, or discovering something about the universe you or I never could. Or maybe I just wish you visited Alaska and I saved your life by showing you the frigid mountain water that flows at the bottom of a river valley.
But the only time travel I know is what’s left behind. So I stuff my backpack with yearbooks where you write beside your own portrait “Me.” And a pinewood derby car our dad secretly weighed down to secure victory. And coins of other currencies from trips our parents took. And Hustler brand playing cards. And a Grateful Dead headband that belonged to our uncle. And I know these objects have little, if any, functional use—that really they are bound for longer sentences in storage. But because I am their keeper now, I can appreciate the removal of an object from a forever place as it’s a reminder that storage is never fixed. And like the leaf from the 90s, or like mammoths preserved in permafrost, I am reminded that coffins are futile, our human measure to preserve what has to disappear. Gravesites on the other hand being real storage centers, house more than just ‘remains”, but our grief and memories and love and names and flowers already wilted, already on the verge of disappearing. To visit them is to meet back up with what we lost. And to also meet back up with what we have, which are the powerful feelings that come with having love and having lost love. But we also get back in the car, return home, try to forget again. There is always a coming and going. Storage carrying inside it the intent to return again.
But you were not placed inside a coffin. We dug no holes. A funeral required too much effort. All of us were exhausted. And not so much the effort needed to organize and implement a funeral, but the effort they demand to put grief into the open. Our pain as something that can be shared, yet also kept or stored away. So instead strangers turned your body into ashes that we split between the three of us. And I carried my portion of pain to Alaska where I worked at my old job, cooking a breakfast buffet for pipeline crews and highway truckers. And after a shift, when the weather was both windy and sunny, I rode my bike five miles up the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that extracted from inside earth what funds big business—and turned onto a mining road running alongside a blue creek. And waded through a cold current discovering boulders overlooking fast moving rapids. And here I pulled you from the darkness that gathers at the bottom of a backpack and sat for an uncertain amount of time, unable to pour your suddenly pourable body into what always appeared to be moving forward. I could not move any further forward. But flowing water always returns from where it came from. Or, there is always water flowing somewhere. Or, all water is in the process of coming and going.
Up to this point in my life I had consolidated my possessions down to what could fit in an orange backpack. It was easier to move with only the things I thought I needed. A tooth brush, a pair of boots, some clean underwear. So when your body fit in a tupperware container, I was not prepared to keep you for long. How full I already was with your absence. And though I eventually poured the ashes into the flowing creek, and discovered in me the noises of a suffering animal, I never left the boulder we sat on. I am still there, in that forever place, watching the water move.
