self-storage and the dream of infinite space

Although the experience of time’s duration is unrecoverable, its ghosts can be reanimated by the persistence, allure, and rediscovery of objects in space. A pressure cooker on a cabinet above the stove, unread books on medieval art from a university course stuffed into a childhood bedroom, the crockery set inherited from an aunt. But when such objects are gathered together without context, we perceive the absolute flatness of time lived and lost, of life displaced.
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A perfect incarnation of one type of storage would collect together all the guilty, festering objects from all the spaces in one’s life and concentrate them in flat, spent time and neutral space. Many storage tenants do this, to some degree. It is a place that does not hold the past in some straightforward balance between preservation and deterioration. It can hold the past as well as the future—that is, a past life to which we may hope to return, or objects with little connection to our past lives but essential to an imagined future, to improvement, or at least to change. It is a place of aspiration.

Here.