storage

Gayle Brandeis is the Bellwether Prize winning writer, the author, most recently, of Self Storage (Ballantine, 2007). This is her stunning meditation on soldiers and loss and the things we throw away.
Please welcome her to CultureKitchen.

A few months ago, Patrick Rogalin, a 20 year old Army Reserve specialist, came home from Iraq to find that all of the belongings he had put into a self storage locker had been auctioned off. All his clothing, all his furniture, all mementos of his life before Iraq, gone to the highest bidder.

My novel Self Storage just came out, so I've been thinking so much about what "self storage" means. How our selves can be so wrapped up in our things. How we often store ourselves away from the world, lock parts of ourselves up. I can't help but see a different metaphor here, though. Our soldiers are coming home to very little to begin with--reduced benefits, meager military pay that often has to be supplemented with food stamps. These young men and women put their lives on the line, and we thank them by denying them treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, by increasing their co-pays for prescriptions. Aside from reuniting with family and friends, they might as well be coming back to empty storage lockers.