Walking down the basement stairs, the foul smell of humidity was in itself a good enough reminder why Ivan never set foot in that place. Between the pain of the journey, the piled up crates of nothing useful and the thick coats of dust over old tarps, there was nothing there worth visiting.

Wading through those dusty crates of nothing, he couldn’t help but feel how that entire portion of the house felt like his life at large. Just a segment of an old structure, buried deep and forgotten, piled up to the ceiling in their widespread containment of nothing worth unboxing. The more he’d think about it, the more comparisons he found: his life, his past, the state of his mental health. Too much looking and feeling like a basement no one wanted to step into.

Things were different, however. Life once again was working its magic of feeling too exciting, too convoluted for its own good. He could feel the cold, uninvited approach of the sense of necessity, of the urge to look for answers where answers were being kept hidden.