Adventurer's Vault

Stuffed into manila envelopes, wedged into the corner of my closet, buried under holiday decorations and extra light bulbs are thousands of hand-written pages. These notepads, printouts, copies, and torn paper chronicle hundreds, if not thousands of hours' worth of memories; battles won and occasionally lost, friends and foes, mysteries, puzzles, secrets and jokes; things learned and solved and unraveled and discovered. The detritus of a decade of 7-11 runs, too-late nights, stories and whispers and laughter and barroom brawls, battle cries and challenges met and fears faced and experience gained now hides, inches thick, in a small, tucked-away corner.

When I try to explain why these pages hold so much for me, the adventures I've had, the lessons I've learned, and the friends that I've made and sometimes lost in their creation, words often fail me. The weight carried by an oddly-shaped piece of plastic less than an inch high, the warmth it carries as I roll its almost-round awkwardness in my palm, the familiarity of the sound as it hits the table--these are things that cannot simply be articulated. But the pages remain, relics, absolute proof of the journey we took to get here.

The oldest of the pages are now a decade old. They were written when having my own apartment seemed even more fantastic than the creatures they described. When the epic battles inscribed between the college-ruled lines were thrilling, but less so than the prospect of actually arriving at college. And when the friends with whom I joined would forever stay by my side, ready to take on the world, our triumphs inscribed eternally in the books of legend.

As time has passed, those pages have begun to yellow. Now, the prospect of rent still sends a jolt up my spine, though no longer does it bring a thrill. College was an adventure full of battles, to be sure, but the promised treasure chest has proven quite rusted, the shining reward within tarnished with reality. And the trusted adventurers with whom I gladly would have taken on the world, a million times over, proved to be sellswords and cowards, bartering their loyalty for avoidance and forgoing conviction for comfort.

So now, I band with new adventures. Our stories are simpler; our victories often feel inevitable, not always won or earned. We do not create worlds, we inhabit those that already exist. I trust them less. I trust everyone less. But I still play the game. And one day, these new pages will join the old, the records of another journey.

I keep the old pages, unwilling or unable to destroy them, those stories we made, the worlds we all explored together. And I still wonder how our story was supposed to end.