hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

I can’t get the pictures to load on Imgur, but I do have pics of Bat’s 10’x25’ storage unit, packed chin-high with decaying cardboard boxes and trash bags full of a mish-mash of possessions packed, at the last minute, in no logical order. How did Bat come to be in possession of a full storage unit of DOOM? Some of that is AuDHD executive dysfunction, and some of it is life circumstances being hard for someone with those disabilities to navigate. You may have seen the ADHD aphorism “DOOM” ie. “Don’t Organize, Only Move”? Well, you’ll be seeing it a lot in this post.

I will tell the sad tale behind a cut.

So this is like archeology, where the further down and back we went in the packed-to-the-door storage unit, the farther back in time we went. So, what we could reconstruct of the timeline goes something like this:

(A-side)
Track 1: The Cheating Ex-husband’s Motorcycle of Asshole Tax
Bat’s mom, Bev, originally got the storage unit to keep some of Bat and their husband’s stuff when they moved to the Carolinas for a few years. It was supposed to be permanent, but then so was their marriage. But cheaters gonna cheat, and so when Bat left him and came home to his Mom’s, they left all of ex-husbands stuff in the storage unit.

Track 2: the wicked stepsisters and Beverly’s untimely death
In the years before Beverly had the strokes, she shifted a lot of her grown children’s possessions to the storage unit. Bats elder two stepsisters’ art projects, all of their left-behind furniture, and their childhood possessions that Bev didn’t have room for but couldn’t bear to throw away all wound up in the storage unit.
Then old age came for Bev, as it comes for us all, should we live so long. She started having strokes, and Bat and his platonic best friend got married, moved new wifey in, and started taking care of Bev. The wicked stepsisters visited but were not part of the care team.
When Bat’s mom died, she left the house to Bat in her will, which meant the elder stepsisters had to use illegal chicanery to put the house on the auction market in another county where they had real estate connections. They sold Bat’s forever home out from under him, gave him a third of the auction price, which was was below market value for that home, and shut the door behind them on being part of Bat’s life. This is why when you talk to any of the Bat-friends about the wicked stepsisters, they know exactly which greedy, corrupt, flint-hearted villains you are referring to.

Track 3: Bat, Why Is There A Piano In Here? A 1930’s Powder-Blue Stove?
Bat had less than a month to move out of the home that was supposed to be his forever, so he took everything with him that he could: the art, the collectors plates, the closet doors his artist mom had painted for him when he was little. He sold the instruments to a friend except for the piano that was too big to take with him. Everything that wouldn’t fit in a 1 bed/1 bath loft wound up in the storage unit. And with these massive new twin traumas of losing his mom and losing his house, Bat’s executive function started getting a lot worse. Like, can’t-hold-down-jobs worse. Can’t-feed-himself worse. Doing-more-drugs worse. He gave up on ever being able to sue for the house back because he couldn’t face the wicked stepsisters, and he started doing harder drugs with the inherited money instead of just being an occasional genteel daytime drunk which was his previous habit.

Track 4: the Platonic Ex-Wife and her Dear-John-Lettering Self Leave Bat in the Lurch.
When Bat decided they could not be in the country on, iirc, the second anniversary of their mom’s death, a friend offered for them to fly out to England and spend the week there, where there were no bad memories. It worked. Bat was feeling more stable and having less SI by the end of that week.
When Bat got back, it was to a mostly-cleaned-out bank account and a Dear John letter telling Bat that their best friend / life partner and her/their kid could not cope with Bat’s trauma, executive dysfunction, and drug use. (I called Bat at just the right time to get to hear about this, and offered to help out. Pushed a little, because I knew that S would likely have gotten a lot of friends in the breakup, and didn’t know who could be counted on. And Bat folded and I got some friends together to help move him out of the Dallas loft, and into a friend’s spare bedroom in their rental house, and we shoved a bunch more stuff in storage. It was about 3/4ths full after that.

Track 5: the Dead Rat
Some of the boxes that we moved post-ex-wife had Kraft easymac cups and boxed pasta mixes in them along with clothes and kitchen accessibility gadgets. Apparently a rat living at the storage unit depot could smell it and moved in. But it had to chew through a lot of cardboard and plastic to get to it, which probably killed it. We found its dessicated corpse on the floor under a chair with boxes stacked on the seat, and a bunch of boxes of clothes had to be thrown out entirely because they’d been nested in, and had rat droppings which nobody was prepared to deal with, not even me. Rest in peace, ratty.

Track 6: the Emotional Shrapnel of Every Additional Move
Apparently every year or six months after that, unbeknownst to me, Bat was having to move to other peoples spare rooms, and their trauma of rootlessness kept compounding, bc by the time I saw the storage unit again, there were layers of trash bags full of de-hoarded DOOM up to chin height.

Track 7: Preparing to Move Again.
When Bat moved in with M and J, and they said he could stay forever, Bat’s trauma started slowly getting worked through. He was doing better, doing less drugs because he was doing better mentally, and when they decided to sell their house and move to Oklahoma, he was devastated. But because he had had 3 stable years of time to heal, he texted me and asked if my perpetual offer of help still stood. And it did, so he asked if I could help him move again, body double with him and be his executive function, and thats what we were doing when he got give the hell-flu by C, the friend/boss at the job he was managing, somehow, to hold down.

Then he died, and then we Bat-Friends cleaned out the storage unit and cried together. And now you have heard the tale of the storage unit. (I can’t get the images to upload on Imgur for some reason, but if you want to see the pictures dm me an email to send them to?)

Thanks for reading about my friend Bat, and his life of fucked up stuff. I love him dearly, lack of executive function and everything. Washing trash bags full of clothes with cat vomit on them and everything.

And if anything in you resonates with anything in this post, remember that you are not unloveable. You are not alone, even if society and your parents shame you into thinking that you are the problem. You are a person with needs and limitations, and that is true of everyone.


Wow, long post is long.