by Paul Elam

Created on: November 18, 2008   Last Updated: January 08, 2009

Joe Bob searches his home futilely for a place to store a box of baseball cards he's collected since childhood. Everywhere he looks is already packed to the edges with something else. The bedroom closets, all four of them, are choked with enough clothing and shoes to start an EBay business. The ones in the hallway are equally spoken for, stacked chin level with cardboard boxes much like the one he's holding, except they haven't been opened in a generation.

With a sigh, he lumbers to the garage and wedges the box in a corner, feeling the sides buckle a little as he forces it between his fishing gear and some power tools. Back inside, something starts to claw at him somewhere in the pit of his stomach, like talons sinking into a small animal. It was the trip to the garage. It was a little too...familiar.

There were two things that all his closets had in common. One, as you know, they were all full. Two, almost none of that stuff was Joe Bob's. Between wife and kids, his home was fully occupied. And it wasn't just the closets. Everything from bathroom counters to bookshelves to basement was the terrain of others. What remained for him was trying to squeeze in what little he had around the property of those considered to actually live there.

Joe Bob's heart sank with an intractable sense of the walls closing in around him. It was as though he had become the baseball cards, stuffed into a cardboard coffin and shoved in the corner with no room to breathe. It wasn't just a shortage of square feet. It was something much more personal; more important.

He thought about the fishing gear. If he were to actually use it again, he'd have to replace all the line. By now it was brittle with age and neglect. Somewhere along the way, exactly when long forgotten, the fishing trips just ended. They had been shelved with other childish things that interfered with his duties to provide for a family. His wife was instrumental in helping this along. Any mention he made of fishing, or any personal enjoyment, was met with cold disapproval and not so subtle questioning of his priorities. The few times he didn't cave in to that he paid for with guilt being tied around his neck like a noose. Eventually he got the point. He might go fishing, but he wasn't going to be allowed to enjoy it.

As time passed by, so did life, in a way. Friends slipped away, personal interests and hobbies became memories. The lack of personal space became a lack of personal identity. Somewhere between the early days

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