How nice it would be to come home from work to the same house, unwind and talk about our day, me to a book, he to potter about in the garage. But this is just a dream at the moment. Distance and the need for employment are the barriers; it certainly isn’t for want of stuff.
Between us we have a storage container on the Gold Coast, a storage container in Dunedin and a 40-foot container in Methven. Accumulated lifetimes of possessions. Enough dining tables and beds to start a commune.
Preparing for the merger, time has come to open these boxes, see what’s in there. What to keep, what to give away. Pandora opened the box because she was curious, we haven’t, because we can’t face it. Not all the ills of the world within, but there’s plenty of baggage.
Storage units are emotional places, hiding sins as much as treasures. There are over 1.25 million square metres devoted to storage in New Zealand.
Opening things up, rummaging through your worldly chattels, you get stuck. Time rewinds. I have an entire 60L Sistema filled with Sophia’s paintings from Arthur Street primary school: "I love you mum you are the best mum" parchments, dried paint flaking, stick figure drawings of mother, daughter, and Ruby the cat. I’m sure I don’t need 1200 of these but I cannot bring myself to throw them away.
The Yorkshireman boxed up his life during the saddest part of it and hasn’t looked at the contents since. The old school uniforms can go, a printer, motocross gear from when his back was elastic. Not the old Lego (the way the Lego was colour coded into separate trays and stored in a manner that can only be described as ‘finickity’ did give me pause, though).
Old photos especially tug on the heartstrings. Now that we don’t print out our camera film anymore, they seem more real than images posted on social media, and further away too. The ink faded, our fledgling hopeful selves disappearing, clothes that were vibrant pinks and blues now tired hues. It’s funny how the past recedes but inside you feel exactly the same. As you get older you’ve remained unchanged, just learned from your mistakes.
A photo of the Yorkshireman from when he was 24 and a young surf god with golden skin and salt white eyebrows proved that, even if he hadn’t been happily married at the time, we wouldn’t have been an obvious couple — photos with old blue tack on their backs from the same time, stuck together in a brick, show me with shaved head and piercings, black territorial army boots and surly attitude. I have definitely improved with age, or I just like and accept myself now and that is beautiful.
Baby booties, fair locks from first haircuts, skis, ice skates, hockey gear, rugby shirts, recipe books, a mumma’s notebooks filled with pride — all the love of the past is still in there when you open a box. It pours out and soaks into you as your hands hold memories.
Of course there is stuff we can get rid of, pass on to someone else. Stuff outgrown, things that just aren’t part of who we are now. My colleagues benefit from outgrown wetsuits, high-heeled boots I can’t walk in, peplum jackets from a flouncier iteration.
For he and me to move on together as a couple we have to unpack ourselves, and it’s not easy. There are things still grieved, stuff we stubbornly hold on to, others locked away lest they cause pain. It’s messy and time consuming but you’ve got to drag it into the light, mourn the cracked bowl, smile at the 3-year-old with startling blue eyes whose mum took that photo in a different time, a different place, a different life.
