Boxed in - the hidden costs of putting dreams on hold

Every week I took the 270 bus down Garrett Lane in Wandsworth, South London to sit in my storage unit.

Not to organise it. Not to clear it out. Just to sit in it. An hour, sometimes more. Me and the boxes and the black bags and the Lego, trying to work out how I’d ended up there.

Image Credit: William Bayreuther, Unsplash

I’d come back from Jamaica the year before.

Seven years I’d lived there, then a failed marriage, a three-year-old, and a weekly bus to a storage unit in Wandsworth. Back in my childhood bedroom. Working out what came next.

The question I kept asking myself, surrounded by metal shutters, light sensors that come on when you walk past, and all my stuff, was how did I get here.

One afternoon, a man arrived in the unit next to mine. Corner spot, bigger than mine.

He was clearing it out — his mother had died, he said, and they were going through probate.

Standard stuff. Bits of furniture. Brown boxes, big and small.

One of them caught my eye.

It was written in capitals, the way people used to write before everything was printed. Blue marker, slightly uneven. One word: TRAVEL.

I asked him about it.

He said it was full of books. Guidebooks, mostly. Places his mother had wanted to go. Things she’d wanted to do. She’d been collecting them for years — adding to the pile, meaning to get to them. Life kept getting in the way. Maybe someday kept becoming not yet.

And then someday ran out.

He folded the flaps back down and moved on to the next box.

I sat there with the image of it — a box full of places she’d never been, labelled so she’d know where to find them when the time came.

The time didn’t come.