Separate ways lead to the same place

Chapter 19

~A week later, Ethan's point of view~

I climb up the wobbly ladder to the attic and sigh at the sight of the room filled with spider webs and a lot of boxes. This is going to be a hard task to do and will take a while. The house has to be empty if we want to sell it. We want to start cleaning before we put the house for sale. With cleaning I mean the whole house, even the garage, attic and basement. I just forgot that my mom and dad both had the habit of keeping litterally everything. Every piece of clothing, toy, picture, videotapes, schoolbag and even every document from school. I wouldn't be surprised if they kept all the drawings I made as a kid. I decide to work from around the ladder to the sides of the attic. The first box is filled to the brim with school documents, so I put it in the hallway at the bottom of the ladder. A few boxes with school documents follow, creating an empty space around the top of the ladder. Zoe takes the boxes downstairs and outside where we have a van to put the stuff in that we want to throw away. The boxes that we want to keep, we put in the now empty bedrooms that used to be for the B&B. I told Zoe I'll put the boxes we want to keep in front of the doors of those bedrooms, so she doesn't accidentely throws the wrong boxes away or something. The next few boxes I open are filled with old clothes from my parents. I swiftly look through them and smile when I feel the soft material of my mom's favorite dress. She used to wear it so much back when dad was still with us. I decide to keep that one just as a memory. I also take a T-shirt of my dad that makes me think of him. It's the T-shirt he wore when he took me with him to a cafe where he had a performance. It was the first time I could go with him. He even let me sing on stage. I'll never forget that day. I just turned 7 if I remember it correctly. I sang 'the scientist' by Coldplay, one of dad's favorite songs.

The song 👇🏻

I still remember every single lyric of that song. I still listen to it regularly. It makes me think of dad and the good times I had with him. I don't have many memories of dad, but the few that I do have are very important to me. I realise I've been staring at dad's T-shirt for a hile now and quickly put it over my arm along with mom's dress. I close the first box with my parents' clothes and carry it downstairs to put it next to the ladder in the hallway. I put mom's dress and dad's T-shirt on a box in front of one of the bedroom doors. I return ti the attic and take the next box with their clothes and so on until I can take the next box. That next box turns out to contain old drawings of me. I look at them quickly, smiling at the scrabbling I called drawing when I were younger. I put the box next to the ladder. The next few boxes contain quite handy stuff like cutlery, plates, other kitchen neccesities and bed sheets. All of those things are really handy and can be sold if not useful, so I decide to keep it all. The attic is still mostly filled with boxes, but it's already late in the evening, so Zoe and I decide to get some take out for dinner and go to sleep after we brought the boxes we want to throw away to the recycling centre.

The next day we both start opening boxes in the attic, since there's a lot left and it'll hopefullty go a little bit faster when we do it together. A big part of the morning we spend looking through boxes that turn out to be filled to the brim with pictures and photoalbums. There is even a box with videotapes that we decide to watch later. We keep some of the pictures, but we're hit with the hard truth that you simply can't keel everything, so we also throw away a lot. When I'm looking through the last box, I stumble across a picture of me and Zoe that makes me smile to myself. We were around the age of 10, I believe. We went to a snack bar and they had a new snack. They offered us to try it and they asked if they could take a picture of us trying it. In the picture, we're both biting on an end, looking in each other's eyes. I remember Zoe blushing and feeling so shy. I really want to keep the picture, so I put in in the little box next to me in which I put the pictures I want to keep. For the rest there aren't many photos I wish to keep, so I'm done not long after. I close the box and bring it down, putting the little box with the photos I want to keep on a pile in front of one of the bedroom doors. I go up the ladder again after. Zoe is done with her box too. ''Done?'' she asks. I nod and smile at her. ''It's noon, we should have lunch. I think we had all the pictures,'' I say. Zoe agrees and we make our way downstairs and into the kitchen. We decide to bake some eggs and have some bread along with it. We make some small talk while eating, but nothing special. I enjoy it nevertheless. We decide to do some more boxes until it's time to make dinner. We have a movie night planned, at least that's what Zoe thinks. I have a fun surprise planned for us tonight. I really hope she likes it. We're going to watch a movie while having dinner on the couch. Then we're going on a walk towards my favorite stargazing spot. The friend group will be there, by coincidence of course. We'll have a carefree evening for once and let loose. I'm looking forward to it. After lunch, we climb up the stairs and the wobbly ladder to enter the attic. The first box I open makes me freeze for a moment as I stare at the contents of the open box in front of me. On top, there's a notebook with a label on it that has the following written on it in a neat handwriting: ''Diary (February 24th, 1998 - May 15th, 2005)'' I recognise the handwriting as my mother's and the dates as my birthday and the day my dad passed away. I know my mom would write in her diary every weekend. She told me once that she just mentions the overall mood she had that week, wether she was living healthy or not and mention the things worth mentioning. I pick up the first diary, when suddenly a paper falls from in between the notebook. I pick it up and frown when I read my nale on the paper that's folded in half. I open it and read my mom's words directed to me.