The light peeps in through the carving on the top. She looks at it often enough but never really opens it.
The carving is intricate but quiet, it doesn't impose, it doesn't demand attention. Like the silence between the music, where they'd kiss against the night sky, his arms around her waist.
He gave her the box at the beginning of the summer last year. Did he know then that it was his last summer, she wondered. Had he decided at that point, that it was all too much for him?
She returned home, drenched from the rains, and found him hanging from the ceiling fan. His head leaned to one side and his mouth curled. Like he'd purse his lips any moment and say "You're beautiful, baby." And then she'd say, "Even like that? All drenched and mucky?" And he'd nod.
He gave her the box for her bangles, because she had so many and she'd have them lying around everywhere. But that never happened. For months after the unfortunate monsoon, the box just sat on one side of the bed. Her side of the bed. She slept on his side, taking in whatever was left of him. The impression on the pillow, a sliver of his perfume. Her heart would beat faster when that happened, and she would cry until her eyes got swollen and her throat closed.
Then one day, on a solo trip to a hill station, she found something in the middle of a forest. The remnants of something dark and terrible but also intriguing and convoluted. And then she brought it back and her heart thundered inside her until she put it in the box and wrapped it in a shawl and hid the box.
The crying stopped. She picked herself up. She ran a comb through her hair and went for jogs. She had a safety net. She had her box, she felt closer to him than she ever had before. She knew, if she wanted to, she could go to him.
Comfort is a strange thing. When you find it, you stop needing it as much. And it comes from strange things. Some write about it, some find pistols in odd places.
In the end, they all sleep better

There’s this compartment in my head. A black wooden box, if you will. That’s where I put all the things that go unsaid. All the things I want to say to people which I don’t.

Sometimes they are sweet things that I know will be misconstrued as cheesy. Sometimes they are mean things that I will later regret saying.

All the words melt into each other inside the box, like little parts of me that found no expression.
Sometimes I force myself to follow the 15 minute rule. 15 minutes is how long it takes for me to get over the momentary rage or hurt of something, atleast calm down long enough to not say vindictive things. That’s the time, the black box begins to burst at the seams with the intensity of all that gets flung into it.

The box sometimes gets a rest and the blog becomes another box; one outside of me where in broken, cryptic words I say the things I didn’t get myself to say out aloud.

There comes a proverbial point in all our lives, when we realize that there are some things that no one else will understand, no matter how close they may be.

At times like these, everyone needs a black box.