undercover | charles leclerc

8 | new beginnings

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Another day going back to meet with her tutor for the final project had gone by. There were very few days for the presentation of her project, as well as, if everything went well, for her graduation.

Luckily, her job was going straight into the route the tutor had for a perfect score in the presentation, so on that, there wasn't that much to worry, just finishing the more written part, the explanations, everything.

But her feelings about the last day were still contradicting in itself after coming back from Italy. Her life hadn't been that messy, not just physically, but more often, emotionally.

Nothing really made much sense, she knew her scars should be closed for good, that those memories shouldn't hurt, but rather being able to look at them like a past version of herself, even if the things she had to do about it could break her further, with the goal of fully healing finally.

She stopped at the stores, picking everything that was sure to help in her personal ordeal, and up at home, two flights of stairs made the trick, as she unlocked the door that led to the attic.
In that moment, she was alone at home, something she really much appreciated, to avoid second-hand thoughts about everything.

But no one had been in that attic in over 3 years, the dust and spiderwebs acted as proof of it, spreading everywhere, without even a lightbulb that worked properly.

Taking everything out to her own room, tenths of boxes now filled her room, as the attic now only had inside the spiderwebs and everything that had to be cleaned or fixed, and only after changing the bulb, and not a speck of dust was seen, the once white walls were finally back to its glory, as well as finally, opening the blinds of the window inside.

It was now time to fix the content of the boxes in her room, and convert the smaller room that was the reminder of a traumatic end, to a more museum-like of her achievements. The room itself wasn't small, to say the least, but it had a slanted roof, so not a very useful room, but now, she had an idea to make it look better.

Most of the boxes were packed to the brim with ziploc bags, doing the makeshift job of albums at the time. Something she remembered from the time was being inside the van her father had, putting the pictures of a later race that had just been developed into the bags, avoiding spending that much in different albums at the time.

Only in the first box there were at least 5 bags like the first, all being labeled with the same title, that had almost fully faded with the passing of the time, "Rookie Year, French F4 Championship, 2016"

it all seemed like it was going to crumble under her touch, those bags were very frail. Inside, the hundreds of pictures piled over each other, some separated by a paper that indicated the race they were. Some pictures did survive, some just didn't.

She assumed that it was from either of those boxes that Arthur's picture that she carried on her purse nowadays has slipped through.

The pictures that survived were placed inside albums, like it should have been, writing, in a small paper placed with them what they were, from what she still kept in her memory lane. She wished those times stayed, but now, it was only a matter of missing them.

It took her the whole day to get to the point she was now, the room now looked very different. A shelf holding all the albums, and in the free shelves, the older helmets that she kept, along one of a swap, which had to be with Arthur, on the opposite side, a rack, holding the suits, still those on the bags to avoid getting those dirty.

It was really a hard task having done all that, but it was necessary, since, in 5 days from there, she was presenting the final project of her degree.

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