This Story Ends Here

It was the child’s easel blackboard that got me. With three words written in coloured chalk. I hadn’t seen it since my home in Tokyo was packed up in 2019. It had been in our family for years at that point. The repository for countless drawings and games. But then it went into storage. For what felt like an eternity.

That year, I moved from Tokyo to London. The house in London was smaller. With far less built-in storage. The idea was to rent another space. A studio. A home for all the music and art and fun stuff.

Then we got Pandemiced. The world became small. My life along with it. So many of the things that defined who I was sat in boxes in some dark storage facility.

Then, in 2022, I left London for Melbourne, expecting to make a new home. Even more stuff went into storage, and I moved into a small apartment that was always supposed to be a temporary home. Then my mother passed away. My father didn’t have adequate care. I was commuting between cities. In the end, it made sense to move to Adelaide. But finding a home where I could unpack everything, with enough room, and enough rooms, given the cost of housing now, was a slow, hard process.

Now those things are coming out of their boxes. I’m watching memory after memory emerge from packing paper. There were a couple of spools of electronics solder that my father gave me when I was a teenager. I used them on my first music technology projects. They travelled with me from house to house, then from country to country, around the world and back. I’d forgotten they still existed.

The artefacts in our lives are storytellers. They’ve travelled with us through time and space. The little Lego guitar and amplifier set isn’t just a thing. It’s an echo of those exhausted moments in London, between cooking pandemic-era meals. I would put a few pieces together, sitting against a sunny corner of the kitchen bench, just to give myself a moment to breathe.

Minimalism has been our religion for some time. And so many TV shows promise we will become the person we want to be if we get rid of our clutter. I remember talking to an interior designer who suggested my home library would look great once he got rid of most of the books. He proceeded to point out which books could stay based on the colour of their spines. And I pretended to listen while I figured out how to get him out of my home as quickly as possible.

Every hobby brings with it stuff. Sheds and studios and kitchens naturally fill with tools and supplies. In a similar way, life’s big journeys – marriage, family, even work – generate their own collections of emotionally resonant objects. Things bought on holiday. Or brought home from school. Or made in some memorable moment.

I forgot I owned a cheap exercise bike. I forgot the colour of my Japanese calligraphy brushes. I forgot how much photography lighting equipment I had. In the years those things stayed in storage, I felt their absence in the forgetting. I yearned for and bought another exercise bike. I picked up new brushes on trips to Japan. I improvised cheap lighting for photos.

“So much of my stuff is in storage” became the story I told about myself. For so long that everyone got tired of hearing about it. But for me, the emotional charge of being separated from my stuff never wore off. I would get confused about whether I owned a certain item, like the wooden backgammon set I bought in Zimbabwe in the ’90s, and whether I had it with me. “Oh, it’s in storage,” I would say with a weary laugh.

How did it happen? After all, I never decided at the outset to put my things into long-term storage, either in 2019 or 2022.

We make one compromise. Then another. We tell ourselves it’s a short-term decision. Then two years leads to another two. Then more.

I couldn’t have predicted the pandemic. I expected to find a home in Melbourne. Then I moved to Adelaide. There are explanations. But, as is so often the case, explanations are not comforting.

“So much of my stuff is in storage” became my identity. A script I would revert to when life felt small and unsatisfying. I had a studio, a workshop, a home gym. Once upon a time. But “the stuff is in storage” was the unsatisfying answer to why my life felt unsatisfactory.

That story is over now. A new home is being made. With all the stuff in it. From Tokyo and London and the other stops in between. All the boxes are being opened at last.

“Finish without regret.” Those were the three words on that child’s blackboard. They were a mantra for me in my final months in Tokyo. I wanted to make the most of the days and weeks I had left. A city that I loved. A home that was a dream come true. A way of life that felt like the culmination of everything I’d learnt over the years.

Now the season of “my stuff is in storage” is finished. I have to learn to tell a different story. And to make art out of the regrets that have grown like weeds over these years.