When I found that tiny door at the back of my closet last weekend, I honestly didn’t think too much of it. Knowing my house, I thought it would be jammed shut and it would be a giant waste of time trying to open it, only to find that behind it laid absolutely nothing. Exciting things never happen to a person like me. I remember when my brother came home last summer and we found that locked safe in my mom’s closet; we spent weeks calling all our relatives who had ever stayed in this house—my grandfather built this house four decades ago and almost every one of my aunts and uncles stayed here for a while at some point—but they all said it wasn’t theirs. And when we finally decided to crack that bad boy open, after we divided among us the wealth this treasure would undoubtedly bring upon us (my share was 40% I believe) we spent an entire day breaking it open with a hammer and a long stick we found, it wasn’t empty. Oh no, there were boxes of jewelry: Cartier boxes, this Omega box, and another one I can’t remember the brand of. Except get this: they were empty! That’s not even the worst part, because deep down we knew that we would be disappointed, so it’s not like I was planning to use the money to pay for university or anything. The worst part is that they turned out to be my mother’s all along. But let’s get back to the door at the back of the closet. You see, I had good reason to believe that it would be as empty and boring as the night is long. I’ve always prided myself on being a realist. I wasn’t going to sit there and make this out to be an ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ situation. I had a closet to clean. Besides, I had a biochemistry final in a couple of days and glycolysis wasn’t going to learn itself. But after my final, I started eyeing that door again. Not because I was delusional enough to think that I would find something worthwhile in there, but because I watched this Dr. Phil episode about this kid whose dad hid her in the closet and starved her and nobody else knew about this, and Dr. Phil kept saying to the dad’s wife “how did you not know about this child in your home?” and she’s all “I honestly didn’t know, I haven’t seen that closet” because it was exactly like this: a closet within a closet. And it’s not that I thought there was a kid in there, but I wanted to know exactly the contents of the area in my five meter radius. I also thought it would be a good hiding spot if the zombie apocalypse came upon us. So I yesterday I woke up, had some cereal, crossed my legs in my closet in front of the secret door of abandoned dreams, and googled how to unlock a locked door, how to break open a door, and how to pick a lock. After briefly contemplating that if I would ever have to explain my internet search history to the FBI or mom or something like that, that it would be difficult to dig myself out of this one, I took a bobby pin and got to work. Except of course I ended up wasting 45 minutes of my youth, and I got bad neck pain, and I just jiggled the door handle really hard in frustration, and the door handle popped off. I was going to peek inside, except what if I found an eyeball looking back at me, or worse, a rat? I decided that if I was going to find a homeless serial killer or a family of rodents, I wouldn’t want them to have direct access to my eyeball, so I just pushed the door open. I would’ve kicked it open for dramatic effect, but I couldn’t stand my full height, and I didn’t want to crouch or strain my neck any more. It already hurt a lot from trying to pick that stupid lock. Now, for the moment of truth, the big reveal, after all that suspense I put you through (sorry), I found…a bathroom. A dusty, rusty, unlit, little closet of a bathroom. Now I know it doesn’t seem like a treasure or anything like that, but to me, it meant not having to share a bathroom with my sister anymore. She does not spend less than 45 minutes in there at a time, and she only goes by intervals of 30 after that, so if it’s not 45 minutes, it’s an hour and fifteen minutes, then an hour 45 minutes, etc. So for me, my own bathroom, though it would need some intense plumbing and somehow some ventilation, was the major jackpot moment of my life.

—By Raghad A., 18, Kuwait