The Storage Unit I Kept Paying For Long After Everyone Told Me To Let It Go

The debit order I never cancelled

There is a debit order that has left my account on the third of every month for four years. Six hundred and something rand, going to a storage place off the R21 near Benoni. My daughter found it once when she was helping me sort out my banking on the phone, and she looked at me the way you look at a person who has left the tap running in another room.

"Dad, what is even in there," she said.

The honest answer was that I did not fully know anymore. When Marlene and I split, I moved out fast, the way men do when they want to look calm and are not. I took what I could fit in the bakkie, dumped the rest of my share into a rented unit, padlocked it, and told myself I would deal with it properly when my head was clearer. My head got clearer years ago. The unit stayed locked.

Going in

I finally went one Saturday in autumn, mostly because the storage company had sent a letter about raising their rates and something about that felt like the universe charging me interest on my own avoidance.

The roller door came up with that gritty scream they all have. Inside it smelled of dust and old cardboard and, faintly, of the aftershave I used to wear when I still cared about that sort of thing. There was the ugly green couch we fought about. Two boxes of kitchen things I had grabbed for no reason, since I cannot cook. A framed photo of a fishing trip with men I no longer speak to.

And near the back, wrapped in a golf shirt, a small wooden box that had been my father's.

I sat down on the green couch, which was a mistake because it swallowed me the way it always did, and I opened the box on my knees.

What was in the box

Cufflinks. A tie pin. My wedding band, which I had taken off in a service station bathroom on the way out and had not been able to throw away. A signet ring my father wore that had never fit me. A thin chain, snapped, that I think was my mother's. A stray earring with no partner anywhere on this earth. All of it gold, or gold-ish, the colour gone slightly dull from sitting in the dark.

I am not a sentimental man on the outside. On the inside I am a disaster. I held the wedding band for a long time and I did not feel sad exactly. I felt done. There is a difference, and it took me four years and a rate increase to tell them apart.

I did not want to keep these things. But I also did not want to just bin them, because they were still, stubbornly, worth something, and my father raised me to know the difference between letting go of a feeling and throwing away value.

Learning what the stuff was actually worth

So I did the thing my father would have done, which is I sat in the car park and got practical about it. I typed Cash For Gold into my phone the way you would type any awkward thing you have never had to do before, half expecting it to feel shameful. It did not. It just felt like admitting the box had a second life ahead of it that had nothing to do with me.

I read for about half an hour, sitting there with the box on the passenger seat like a hitchhiker. I learned that the broken chain and the odd earring were not junk at all, that even a snapped piece is weighed on its actual gold content, that reputable Gold Buyers will tell you the carat and the mass in front of you and show you the calculation instead of muttering a number and hoping you are desperate. I did not know any of that. I had assumed you got fleeced, because that is what men assume about anything they have avoided for four years.

What settled me was reading how the pricing is tied to the day's gold price, which moves, so a fair place works off a real figure rather than a mood. I went in on the Monday to a proper Gold Exchange rather than the first pawn window I saw, mostly because I wanted the box to leave my life through a front door and not a side one.

The counter

The woman who weighed everything wore reading glasses on a beaded chain and had the unbothered manner of someone who has watched a hundred men bring in the wreckage of a marriage in a shirt. She did not ask questions. She weighed each piece, told me the carat, kept the different golds separate, and wrote the numbers where I could see them.

When she picked up the wedding band she paused for half a second, the way a nurse pauses, and then she just weighed it with the rest. I was grateful for that half second and grateful that she did not make it a moment.

The total was more than I expected and less than the four years of storage rent, which is a joke I have decided to find funny rather than tragic. I kept the cufflinks, because those were genuinely my father's and I will wear them at my daughter's wedding one day and mean it. Everything else I let her take.

Driving home lighter

I cancelled the storage debit order in the car before I even pulled off, thumbs shaking slightly, and it went through first try, no letter required, no drama, four years undone in about eleven seconds.

The green couch I gave to the storage company's cleaner, who wanted it. The kitchen boxes went to a shelter. The fishing photo I actually kept, because those men were good to me once, whatever happened later.

I phoned my daughter on the way home and told her the unit was empty and the debit order was dead. She went quiet, then she laughed and said, "So all it took was them putting up the price."

"Turns out I only respond to invoices," I told her.

But that was not really it. What I had been paying to store was not a couch or a box of gold. It was permission to not decide anything. And you can rent that for a long time, longer than four years, if nobody puts up the price. The metal cupboard is empty now. My father's cufflinks are in my sock drawer where I can reach them. And on the third of next month, for the first time in a very long time, nothing at all is going to leave my account for the privilege of not moving on.