Somewhere in Here

A garage is supposed to be a place to keep your car or start a wildly successful technology company. Mine is neither. It’s more like a weigh station for unwanted items on their way to nowhere.

It’s a two-car garage, and I have two cars, but neither one of them has ever been in here, not in the twenty-five years since we bought the place, not ever.

That’s not the point.

There’s room to park in the driveway and on the street, and the weather here is never all that bad.

My point is the garage is not what I want it to be. There’s hardly enough room to turn around there’s so much crap out here. Where does all this crap come from—that’s what I want to know. Where does it keep coming from?

Over in the corner there. That’s my drawing table and my stool. Think I could get to them and actually draw something? Maybe try a watercolor or something? Not a chance. It would take me all day just to clear a path.

Look at this junk. There are boxes everywhere, and bags. Freestanding shelves stacked with what I don’t know. Furniture that made its way from the living room to the sun room to here, and now even the charities won’t take it. I have no idea how some of these boxes got here, because they’re too big for me to lift. Sloane could never budge them.

And what’s this here? A blank book. Why here? I had a habit of buying these things and never filling them. Where are the rest of them? No idea. But, look, there are words in this one:

Barefoot girl in a backless dress … Streetlights on wet pavement … The shadow of a small plane flickers across the contours of the grassy shoreline … Long-haired boys and short-haired girls … A white blouse with black buttons …

Apparently all these images meant something to me once, but now … nothing.

Along the wall over there is my table saw and my workbench with all my tools and supplies. I got stuff over there I haven’t even opened. Yards of clothesline, a new flashlight, molly bolts. How I ended up with four cans of WD-40 I’ll never know.

You’d have to move twelve boxes to find out what’s in the chest of drawers by the door. I mean, goddamn, this is out of control. That stack on the table? That wasn’t there yesterday. I have half a mind to rent a giant dumpster and trash it all, but I know there’s a lot of valuable stuff in here, too. Stuff you could never replace. It’s just a matter of finding it.