And so I started looking around the bathroom.

As I approached the sink I looked in the mirror, this was the first time I saw my face after I returned, apart from dark bags under my eyes and being covered in blood — I was fine.

I then turned on the faucet and started washing the blood off my face.

When I decided that I’d done a decent job I turned my attention to the bathtub that was standing on the far side of the room.

When I was a child we had a bathtub in our first house, I loved playing around in the water with my toy ship sometimes, but when the city we lived in decided to build a giant trading center in place of the city block our house was in so we had to move out.

Don’t get me wrong we found an even better house outside of the city, but it had a shower instead of a tub, so that was quite a bummer…

So you can now understand the joy I had when I rushed to the tub — eager to wash off the dirt and blood.

I then filled the tub with hot water and sat there for an hour. Later I picked one of the towels, wiped myself dry, and then finally put on the clothes. They were a size larger than I was, but that didn’t bother me — I was used to hand-me-downs from my relatives.

After taking care of that I left the bathroom and started walking toward my room for the night, on my way I noticed the picture frames to my left so I momentarily stopped to look at them - they were photos of Mr. Honasson, his wife, and his son.

The good mood was abruptly ruined when I noticed the shelf below the pictures —

laid on it was a folded American flag and a pair of dog tags that were half melted together beside it, next to them was a vase full of roses.

Most of my knowledge of America before that summer was from movies and TV shows, but even that was enough for me to know the meaning of what I saw.

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Without saying a word I lightly bowed my head and turned back to my destination.

When I opened the door — a small cloud of dust rose into the air, I waited for a moment for it to recede before I entered the room.

I quickly figured out that it was probably “His” room, the bed was made, but it had a visible layer of dust on it. When I approached the bed I took the blanket in my hands and waved it around — causing another dust cloud before I finally laid down to rest.

At least my dreams that night weren’t a complete nightmare after that emotional rollercoaster.

Well, it wasn’t much of a dream per se, it was more of a flashback to my childhood.

It was a distant memory from when I was … 5, 6?

That was quite a summer, it has already been a few years since we moved houses.

Me and my big brother enjoyed nature and would go out into nearby woods to look for adventure every day, most of the time we explored abandoned buildings, but that summer we found quite the place.

We had a creek running along our house from which my mother would draw water for her garden. On one of our adventure hunts, we decided to follow the creek downstream.

The creek went deep into the woods, and as we followed it we noticed more and more abandoned buildings built alongside it, when we finally reached the end we were quite puzzled — the creek was flowing into a boarded-off cave.

Being the children that we were — my older brother and I went home, “borrowed” our father’s crowbar, and pried off some of the planks covering the cave.

It was a sight to see — stalagmites and stalactites all over the cave, water on the floor barely reaching my shins, and the creek at the entrance shimmering from the sun.

But that wasn’t all there was, seeing a tunnel that was above water and going deeper into the rock — we decided to again “borrow” our father’s spare hardhats he had lying around from his old construction job, took our flashlights, and ventured deeper.

There were wooden supports that were overgrown with glowing moss,

and rusted buckets full of colorful rocks which we later took plenty of to decorate mom's garden — which she adored.

When we reached the end — we were met with a room that had a big rock sitting in the middle with glowing moss slowly consuming it.

Water was dripping from the ceiling like rain, and there was mining equipment placed all around the room with some pickaxes still stuck in the walls.

That place ended up being our main base for the remainder of that summer.

Sadly after a rough winter, the water from all the snow washed away all the wooden supports so the tunnel collapsed in on itself, leaving a lot of knick-knacks we stored there lost.