The whole ordeal began innocently enough. My dad had finally decided to tackle his ancient detached garage, a structure he hadn’t touched in any meaningful way since I was in middle school, sometime around the early 2000s. It wasn’t just cluttered; it was a mausoleum of forgotten domestic projects and expired technologies. He had enlisted me and my closest friend, Liam, to handle the job—a seemingly straightforward task of turning decades of dusty chaos into organized sanity. The place smelled faintly of stale motor oil, damp cardboard, and the metallic tang of forgotten ambition. It was packed wall-to-wall with relics:…The place smelled faintly of stale motor oil, damp cardboard, and the metallic tang of forgotten ambition. It was packed wall-to-wall with relics: a lawnmower from the 90s, boxes labeled with my baby pictures, a precarious stack of broken furniture, and random metal parts that truly looked like they were either remnants of a spaceship or components for a medieval torture device. It was the classic “Dad Archive,” where every object had a potential story but was too covered in grime to tell it. We were working slowly, methodically sorting through a back shelf near a window perpetually coated in dirt, tossing rusty screws into one pile and half-empty cans of paint into another.