This is my refrigerator.

And there are many stories held with. This is the contents.

But all of this food is not my food. Not at all. I only get the top shelf

Actually I only get half of the top shelf.

I used to get the whole top shelf but then one morning, while tired, I dropped a jar of jam and the shelf above the vegetable drawer shattered into a thousand razor sharp pieces of glass. So I gave up half of my shelf to the person who used to have that shelf. Best I can tell my landlord’s not going to fix it because it’s too hard. That bastard.

So we’re down to this small area of the refrigerator. I’ve got to fit everything that I have to keep cool in this small area. Let’s reach into the back and see what we find.

There are a number of objects in the back of my refrigerator, but only two of them really count. In this picture you can see my butter, soy sauce, and yeast. But none of those count. I use those frequently, just not daily like the stuff in front of my fridge.

This container of lemon juice sort of counts. But I still intend to use that to make more hummus. So I think it’s hardly neglected, the fact that I haven't taken it out for months notwithstanding.

But these pickles… These pickles definitely count.

Back when I moved into this apartment, there were already three people living here. At some point we got together to divide up the fridge into it’s current shelf system, which involved going through all the food and getting it sorted. But as we went through every item in turn, we came to pickles, And nobody knew who the pickles belong too. Now, I figured “Hey, I like pickles.” So I took the pickles. But I didn’t eat them. Not for months. They were sort of unsettling after all. No way of knowing how old they were. No way of knowing where they came from. They were mystery pickles. They could be poison. Better not to risk it.

I had tried a pickle once and then put it back there again. But I didn’t remember what the pickle had been like. So I decided to try another one.

Open the jar it smelled like dill. Very strongly. After tasting the pickles, I figured out why I hadn’t gone back to them before. They’re not very good. They’re not bad either, just not good. Not worth the trouble of eating them but also not bad enough to justify throwing them away. They’re in a strange limbo when they’re just sort of crummy.

I suppose that I’m going to eat the rest of the pickles anyway, just to free up the room in my refrigerator. I don’t have any room for tale of neglect and abandon.