People often keep their cherished memories stored in a drawer or hanging in a room, but those that get forgotten, or perhaps that they want to be forgotten, end up in a box in an attic or something of the sort. It's as if they want to throw the memory away, but can't bring themselves to do it.

I was in my late twenties and found myself loading my grandfather's truck with items from a storage locker that had been purchased after the man who owned the stuff forfeit the locker. The man's wife had fallen gravely ill and the medical bills had piled up. He fell behind on the payments and when the owner of the storage lockers offered to let him catch up slowly the man told him no he just didn't want to deal with the locker anymore. I figured this must be a room full of stuff that belonged to his wife. The things that she had cherished in life only served to bring him pain and with her gone these things were just too painful to look at. He must have wanted to throw them and the pain he felt away, but he couldn't so he just walked away.

My grandmother and my cousin began going through the locker and finding what they wanted me to load into the truck. There were musical instruments, kaleidoscopes, papers, books and records; typical stuff you might find in this type of locker, but then my grandmother produced an old soap dish not unlike the kind they had issued us in marine corps basic training, but much older. It was small, warped and showed the years it had endured. Inside the soap dish she found a wedding band and an old dog tag from many decades ago. This was just tucked away in the locker the man wanted to walk away from. My grandmother thought perhaps a soldier was killed and these items were sent to his widow and now they end up here, the tragic end of the forgotten soldier.