One place that’s lonelier than a storage unit is a storage unit at night, a storage unit on Halloween night, a storage unit when Halloween’s your wife’s favorite holiday and it’s falling flat this year, lost in the letdown, lost in the fear that’s been squeezing your stomach all day. A storage unit’s lonely when the fear’s there, the fear you know you need to shake but you don’t know how to shake, because how do you shake the scary when the scary’s so damn scary and the scary seems so real? A storage unit’s lonely when it’s just gotten dark, and you’ve long since gotten hungry, and the year long since hasn’t gone that well, and tomorrow’s November and you’re not quite lost but you think you’re probably losing.
Billboards are too liminal on lonely nights. They’re too white, too bright, too matching with the vacant, lit-up lobby and the exposed fluorescent tubes hooked to motion sensors. The wind’s not blowing, so there isn’t any howling outside, but the cars hustle by on both levels of the interstate, and are there really people in all those cars? Whole people, with whole lives, and whole scary-squeezed stomachs staring at storage units?
The storage unit isn’t lonely on a gray All Saints Evening, it’s just gray, like the evening, and it’s tired and it’s in a hurry. It’s gray and it’s tired and it’s in a hurry but the tired wins, and you forget you have to punch the code a second time to use the elevator, so it takes a minute, scrolling, to realize the carriage hasn’t come.
It’s amazing they made pavement the same color as the sky, at least on days like these, and it’s amazing what a full stomach and a sweater can make out of November compared to a t-shirt and a little bit of hunger. There’s the feeling of strolling out of church, inspired, and there’s the feeling of not having gone to church, not having really considered going to church, of having not having done that a lot lately. And it feels like any saint’s a whole universe apart.
You didn’t go to the storage unit on All Souls Day, but you ran some ramen out into the countryside, five miles past the last town to some subdivision that was once merely a hint of a bad idea but is bigger now than the next ghost town over, the name without a place four thousand feet to the subdivision’s east. The subdivision was sparse, and it was silent, and it was lit only by streetlights, and you had to take the picture twice but even then it didn’t take so some new homeowner’s got a doorbell video of you walking away for a couple minutes, then walking back and holding your phone up at it again.
The roads were bubbling, bubbling in the slow way, the decades way, the way roads bubble when they’ll be gravel sometime soon if the sprawl doesn’t get there first and knock the whole place flat. And it’s a little fucked up that you went out to an in-between place on All Souls Day, and it’s a little confusing that the country roads didn’t feel free, the way country roads always felt free back home. Maybe it was the muggy.
Churches rang bells this afternoon, back in the city. It didn’t get you yet.
