It’s nothing special. Really, it’s just like every other garage. It’s crowded, cluttered, and anyone who dares enter to look for something always leaves carrying something else. And though its contents have changed over the years, relics I should have long discarded and treasures I should have better preserved still await the day a warm hand will brush off their coats of dust and take them elsewhere than the bottoms of creased boxes or lift them from the cold, concrete floor. Cabinets galore line the garage’s stucco walls, each shelf choking with an odd assortment of belongings not important enough to take inside, but “essential” enough to save. It’s hard to imagine how a disfigured pogo stick, a single rollerblade, and space-consuming snowboards for snow I’ve seen once made the cut.
When I was younger, whether I ventured into the garage to grab my sneakers or slipped inside at darker, more sinister hours to convince myself that dull creakings and shallow echoes were just that, I remember being scared. Scared that the velvet black folding into the corners of the garage and lurking along the edges of grainy, coarse shelves would somehow swallow me as well. Scared that I’d get lost in the labyrinth of cardboard columns and forever breathe the stale air of things lost and forgotten. Though I still wield a broom to hack away at dangling spider webs, or worse—spiders themselves—now I’m less afraid of death-by-shadow than I am worried about, with the flick of a switch, what might be brought to light.
After hitting the lights, I don’t have to look hard to find―or rather, considering its size and proximity to the garage door, look hard to notice―the shoe rack. Besides the fact that all I associate with that rusted scrap bit are pointless attempts at sorting its contents by color, size, and owner only for it to be ransacked, when I do notice the shoe rack, it just reminds me that it wasn’t all too long ago that I could comfortably slip my thin legs into those just as thin blue rain boots, or wriggle my even smaller toes into those small, brown Crocs. I try putting each pair on again. As if I hadn’t already guessed, I couldn’t.
I’m not sure why I keep those shoes around. It’s not like I really want them, because if I did I’d keep them inside. It probably has something to do with my insistence that when they’re buried amidst the jumbled heaps of withered clothes and garish Christmas decorations and unplayed board games, they’re close enough that I won’t forget, but far enough that I won’t always remember. That is, forget the times I would dash into the pounding rain in those thin, blue rain boots only to retreat into the dry haven of the open garage again and again, or remember that those same boots have faded in the garage for much longer than I spent wearing them.
In the far corner of the garage, like all others, the shelves are clogged with stuff: bright cones, deflated balls, paint cans rimmed with crusted flakes, a sampling of half-working emergency flashlights and lanterns, standard boxes. I’m just looking at the boxes, though, and one in particular. A box of books. A box of textbooks. A box of thick, medical textbooks that my dad referenced when he started practicing surgery and others my mom studied to become a dermatologist. I used to watch them, my parents, watch them with those books with doting eyes and hushed whispers. I told myself when I was older I would pore over those textbooks until my eyes were red and scratchy. I told my parents I would pore over those textbooks so I would be just like them. But I am older now. I’m older, and I haven’t touched those textbooks. But I hope that even if I never read them, someday I’ll have my own textbooks in my own garage suffocated by my own stuff. I would like that.
I’m not leaving just yet—at least not until I find that cabinet of pictures. The issue isn’t where the cabinet is, it’s that the cabinet is surrounded by, blocked by things. With a frayed rocking chair at one end and a dark table my dad carved at another, along with little room for adjusting either, I barely manage to ease the cabinet open, revealing just a shallow gap. Lacking any alternatives, I grimace, clench my teeth, close my eyes, and shove my wrist into the alcove before me, praying to the Lord Almighty that all I feel are photographs. Afraid my prayer will expire, I grab the nearest stack of pictures and wrench my arm straight out.
As I sift through the different photographs, sliding each image behind the last, I’m relieved to have a good one (which spares me from another trip into the cabinet). So as I rub my oily fingers in hazy streaks across the picture, smudging my face and tracing my flashy smile, I can’t help but return that smile. Because in the confines of this concrete storage room—in this garage—though I’m reminded of just how fleeting the past seventeen years have been and the next seventeen will be, as I stand here, in the present, clutching a thing of the past and wondering how or if it will matter in the future, if I want to remember, or if I want to forget, I need only unlock the garage door.
