The Broken Wall

I slammed the sledgehammer into the wall and felt the chalky material give way. All around me was destruction, and it felt fitting – symbolic even. This was the razing that came before the remaking. I was doing to this house what I had done to my life.

As my body surged with another bout of violence, my thoughts floated like dust motes through the air.

Change.

Sorrow.

Divorce.

This time, when my hammer hit the wall, it punched through.

Joy.

Blessing.

Loss.

Wrenching.

As I pulled back, the heavy head caught on the plaster. Dismantling was never easy. I yanked hard and felt the plaster peel and then give way to gravity. A large piece fell to the floor with a crash I barely noticed. My muscles bunched again and then –

Brokenness.

Wholeness.

Discov----

A something-that-doesn’t-belong broke the flow of drifting nouns. There, nailed to an ancient stud, hung a small black notebook and brown paper package tied up in twine. My heart, which had been pounding hard and rhythmically, skipped a beat.

The notebook and package were covered in dust and dreams. I could remember the hundreds of times I crawled through my grandparents’ attic hoping to find something hidden and old. Or the thousands of times I pressed the odd-tile-out in the bathroom, wish-believing that it would activate a secret door to a room filled with sooty archeological treasures.

When I was six, my great-aunt had given me a tarnished hand-mirror. She told me in whispers that it had been passed to her by a princess who had found it buried beneath a rose bush. I never questioned why the princess had been digging under a thorny bush, the answer seemed natural: to find something bygone and beautiful. That mirror was my most cherished possession until I was twelve and saw the horribly incriminating words “Made in China” engraved on its handle.

Here, before me, hung a plausibly real treasure. The house was built almost two centuries before, was decrepit, and had never been updated. It was the perfect hovel for a penniless divorcee in her mid-thirties who couldn’t stop herself from dreaming about a home that wouldn’t be snatched away. Apparently, it was also the perfect hiding place for whatever this was that dangled so quietly before me.

I reached out, and just like Indiana Jones had done so many times before, I wiped a layer of gray dust off the notebook to reveal the writing beneath. There, inscribed on its cover in gold lettering, was a phrase that sent electricity through my veins: “The Quest.”

Kicking and shoving a space amongst the rubble on my floor, I folded down, and with trembling hands, I untied the twine and creaked the notebook open.

If you are reading this, the notebook said in a scrawling hand, you have found what I have hidden. In my pages, I will tell you of the sorrows and horrors that have led me to hide so great a sum. I will also tell you of the dreams I had and the hopes I pass to you.

The sun, which had been high in the sky when I first opened the notebook, was now splashing the clouds with pinks and purples. I had read and reread the story held within the sepia pages. The journal alone was an artifact worth sending to a museum. It told a tale of love, wealth, loss, betrayal, and revenge.

Ultimately alone in the world, the writer had hoped that one day, someone would find their story and wealth. The lumpy brown package sat heavily on my lap. According to the scrawl, it contained $20,000.

$20,000.

Twenty.

Thousand.

Dollars.

I don’t remember breathing. I don’t really remember moving. I watched my fingers, white from plaster and powdered years, break the seal. And there it was. The money that could and would change my life. The money that would allow me to fix my car and get health insurance. The money that would let me breathe and believe that I was really going to be okay.

And behind it was a thick packet of folded papers. A final letter from my scrawling writer.

Herein lies the approximate sum that will allow you to journey to the location where I have hidden my true wealth. It will be no easy feat to reach it, as the land is untamed and, to my knowledge, undiscovered by any other soul save my own.

Behind this sheet were three more filled with detailed instructions, drawings, maps, and latitude/longitude coordinates. There were also warnings about those whose attention I might draw by charting travel to the secret destination.

Finally, there was a request:

The journey will be dangerous, but not impossible. If you choose to venture forth and seek the greater sum, use the money to bring love to the world. Mine is a saga of loss, let yours be an epic of plenty.

And there I sat, on the floor, in ruination and rumination. Would I? Could I? Based on the description, I felt certain that I would end up using the majority of the $20,000 to find the final resting place of the vast wealth described in this addendum. What if someone else had already found it? What if it had fallen into a never-ending pit? What if I spent everything to find nothing?

Twentythousanddollars. I tried to think it quickly. Perhaps if I thought it quickly, I could grasp it and then imagine letting it go. TWENTYTHOUSANDDOLLARS. It wasn’t working.

But how could I not go? How could I refuse the greatest adventure of my life and the perhaps of a thousand lives combined?

I was frozen by the flush, swirl, and stream of queries quizzing and whizzing through my mind.

Until suddenly I wasn’t.

Shower.

Shoes.

Notebook.

Adventure.