Love Letter Written in Winter

Part 4 - Inside Drake's mind

Drake couldn’t sleep. He was continuously remembering something. That girl. Very mysterious. He didn’t know what he felt for her. But something definitely. Not mere attraction; if that was it, Drake should have forgotten that. On the way home, didn’t he just meet numbers of more beautiful girls than her? Yes, he did. But then why couldn’t he remember any of their faces? Why did he just remember that one face?
Drake felt suffocated. He couldn’t lie to himself anymore. He woke up and sat on his bed. It was 2 a.m. at night. He didn’t look at his wife lying just beside him; he didn’t remember to do so.
He looked through the window pane beside his bed and gazed at the starry night, asking himself, what was it? Just a mere attraction over beauty? Or something deeper than that?
He confessed to himself that it’s not just about beauty. She was beautiful, no doubt, but she wasn’t the most beautiful girl he ever met. But she indeed was one of the most special people he has ever met. Some different aura she had! Very different! With that aura, now she was slowly conquering his whole mind. His nerves were losing their control. They were just surrendering in front of the mighty Queen.
Not just that night; even after a week had passed, nothing really changed, though Drake was expecting something to change. That woman didn’t really leave his mind. With each new sunrise of the week, Drake expected that memory to fade, but it became more radiant with each passing day. The Queen had already started ruling over half of his neurons. Unknowingly, he was actually counting the days to meet her again.
It was Thursday night. After dinner, Drake didn’t go to sleep. He stayed up, saying he had to look for something upstairs in the storeroom. No one doubted him.
Locking the storeroom, he finally opened that almirah, which he never opened in front of any of us. There lay his old guitar, all those paintings, and a diary filled with poetries written by the teenage or young Drake. In the initial days of love, Drake showed me one or two of his poems, but I always made fun of him. What was with all those crippling words! Useless! A waste of time and ink, I always thought! So Drake stopped showing me his poems.
Later, on a cleaning day, Rose got one piece of paper from those diaries. She ran throughout the house, reading the verses aloud. We all laughed a lot. Drake didn’t show neither happiness nor anger. But now when I think about how he must have felt at that time, I feel he must have been really embarrassed seeing his thoughts becoming a laughing stock for everyone. Since then, that almirah became inaccessible to all of us. Only he had the key to that almirah. And he wouldn’t open it in front of any of us. If ever we insisted, he would give a disgraceful look and say in a serious voice,
-'I said, No! Even after being a son-husband-father, just as a human being, I should have some private space…’
He usually doesn’t say all those heavy words. If he is saying so, that means there are tons of unspoken, undefined thoughts flooding his mind, which can turn into anger, hate, or disappointment—at any point in time. So, I didn’t take any chance. After that, I never insisted on reading any of his diaries. And with time, I had totally forgotten that something like that ever existed.
After opening the almirah, he took one of his teenage diaries, a diary from the time when he used to stay immersed in En Michelles's poetry all day, when he used to read about those fierce cloudy green eyes of the lover of the author. He didn't know whether his lover naturally had a cloudy eye or if it was his illusion; his eyes were so filled with her existence that he couldn't even distinguish her from himself. Young Drake used to dream that he would meet someone like that someday and would fall for her like a poem. He used to imagine that dreamy lady and write some verses to dedicate to her once they met. But life is not a fairytale. It didn't happen like that. He got a very ordinary college love story, marriage, family.