The Secret Attic

I looked at the clock for the tenth time in the past fifteen minutes. It felt like time was passing much slower than usual. Weekends have always been boring for me, but with my parents visiting my grandmother for the whole day and all my friends busy, the boredom had just doubled. Mom and dad asked me to come along but since my annoying cousins were going to be there too, I chose my peace and stayed back home. 

After looking at the clock for the eleventh time, I got up from the sofa where I had been lying for the past half an hour, and started roaming around the whole house. I mean, there must be something I find interesting to do in this whole house to prevent myself from getting bored to death?  

We had a huge house. I remember my friends used to joke about getting lost in it one day and find a secret passageway that leads to another side of the town. My grandfather left it for all five of his sons but since all my uncles shifted to different cities, we were the only ones left to live in it. And so, it felt much bigger for our small family of three, than it actually was. 

I picked up my baseball that was lying in the corner of the corridor in the far side of my room and started throwing it towards the wall on my upfront so that it would bounce back toward me and I would catch it. I wish I was out playing baseball with my friends. It has been my favorite sport since I was six. If you took a tour of my house, you would find dozens of baseballs lying in different corners of the house. I liked collecting them, call it a hobby of mine. 

While I continued throwing the ball a few times, one time it hit the ceiling and I heard a thud, as if it hit a piece of wood or something similar. I looked up. I couldn’t tell if there was actually a secret passageway above me or if I just heard wrong.  

To confirm, I picked up the ball again and first threw it on far side of the ceiling and then on the part where I heard the thud.  

There was a difference between the two sounds and I was convinced there was something up there. I got excited as I thought my boring day wasn’t going to be so boring anymore as I was about to discover the ancient secrets of my house hidden above the ground I was standing on. 

I brought a torch and a ladder from the other side of the house, which is normally used whenever we need to get the house repainted, and started climbing upwards. I knocked on the ceiling once. There was definitely something up there! I tried pushing it open. It was a little heavy but I managed to open it, turned on my torch and climbed in to a dark, dusky room.  

It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I started looking around and the only thing lightening the room was the torch I had brought along. The whole place was filled with boxes and only boxes.  

No secret passageway, I thought to myself disappointed. Maybe the day wasn’t going to be as interesting as I thought it would be before I knew I was about to discover a secret room in my house full of boxes. Without bothering to check what was in the boxes, I turned towards where I had entered and was about to climb down when something caught my eye. It was something inside a box at the far end of the room and the only thing I could tell from the distance was that it was red in color.  

Now curious, I made my way towards the box and opened it. To my surprise, it was an old t-shirt with my name written on the back of it in black. I instantly remembered it used to be my favorite one back in the days and I used to wear it everywhere. One day, I just stopped wearing it and then it disappeared and I never thought about it again.  

I put the torch in my mouth and opened the whole box. It was filled with all kinds of garments, the ones I didn’t even remember wearing when I was younger. So many of my favorite ones that I had almost forgotten about were always here and I didn’t even know.  

I started opening the other boxes to explore some more things that might be present inside. I found a total of three boxes with all my old clothes that I had stopped wearing because I had outgrown them a long time ago. With every garment I picked up, there was a memory attached to it. Like the red one that caught my eye the first time while I was making my way down was the one my grandma had gifted me on my eighth birthday. Or the white one I found in the other box which I used to wear whenever I played baseball as a child. Seeing all those old clothes and reminiscing the good old days from my past, I didn’t realize that my eyes had filled with tears.  

We’re so busy in growing up, we don’t realize when we have begun to outgrow our belongings and one day, we forget about all the things that used to be our favorite while growing up. 

One by one, I carried all three of the boxes down carefully and closed the secret door to the secret ceiling I never knew existed in my house. 

For a long time, I kept looking at the boxes and thought what I should do with my old stuff I had found. They meant a lot to me but it felt like a complete waste if I left them in the attic above. 

Then it suddenly hit me and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them. 

One by one I carried the boxes outside in to my driveway and loaded them on the backseat of my car. I drove for fifteen minutes before arriving to my destination. 

‘Do you need help with those, sir’? The security guard watched me unload the boxes and asked.  

‘Sure. A little help would be appreciated’. 

He helped me take the boxes inside the old but well-maintained building. As I made my way through the corridor, many innocent faces around me stopped doing whatever they were doing and stared at the stranger who had entered inside their home. 

‘Hello, sir. How can I help you’? A man sitting at the main office of the orphanage greeted me. 

‘Hello. Actually, I found some old clothes of mine which are in good condition and I really wish to donate them to a few orphan children’. 

‘That is so thoughtful of you. I haven’t seen many people your age coming here to donate stuff to these children. I’m so happy you thought of them and came here. Why don’t you follow me’? 

I followed the man through the corridor outside the office and walked behind him until we entered a room full of children who weren’t just orphans but also disabled.  

‘This whole place is filled with orphans but the other ones still manage to be adopted or live life in a much better way than the children who are present inside this room’. 

I looked at the children one by one and gave them each a smile. They smiled back. A worker at the building brought my boxes and placed them in one side of the room. 

‘You can take as much time as you want with these lads. They’re very friendly and they absolutely love company’. The man said before he left the room and left us alone. 

There was a total of fifteen to twenty children in the room. They all looked at me as if they’ve never seen someone from the world outside their little home. With this many pairs of eyes staring at me, I didn’t know how to or where to start from.  

‘Hello guys! I’m Rafay.’ I started, after clearing my throat. ‘You know when I was your age, I used to have all these cool outfits’. I stepped toward the boxes and picked up the red shirt from one of them. 

‘Like this one. It used to be one of my favorite while growing up. My grandma gifted this to me when I turned eight’. The children looked at the shirt I was holding up. One by one I took out all my clothes and distributed it among the children while telling them the story behind all of them. They smiled and laughed at a few funny stories, raised their hands whenever they liked one and I had to pick which one I would give it to. After I was done distributing and emptied the last box, I peeked around the room. All of their faces were enlightened and they started chanting excitedly about the new outfits they had just received. Watching the beautiful sight, I didn’t realize when the man from the office had entered. He put a hand on my shoulder. 

‘You know, a lot of people have asked me what I get sitting around in an orphanage the whole day when I could have started any other business’. He looked toward me and continued with a smile on his face, ‘Now I guess you can understand why.’  

It was true. I never felt this way in my entire life. The feeling was beyond any words could describe. I smiled back at him. 

And that, my friends, is how the most boring day of my life turned in to the most beautiful and memorable one.