Misty

[1] The Box In The Attic

It all started the day I had started to understand things.

The things I couldn't understand before. No one in my place would have understood it until one of my friends shared it with me.

Talking about friends, I know many of them. But the one I had been relying upon since ever was my Grandmother.

Usually, grandmothers are involved in a story where the lead heroine is an introvert because she can't really open up to other members of her family or outside people. Or the one who lives in a house full of step-brothers and sisters. No one gives her a shi.t but the sweet and humorous grandmother. Or the one who is orphaned and all she has left is her grandmother as the family.

For me, none of the above was my condition. I wasn't an introvert but a lively girl. Meeting people, making new friends, going out, and enjoy life was an elegant kind of casual thing for me. I didn't have step-brothers or sisters. I had a family, a big family with my mom and dad, two brothers and two sisters. But I rarely know them, their age, their liking, and whatever else. I just knew that they existed and how they looked like.

By knowing all of this, you could guess that I wasn't an orphan now. Was I? A big fat no. Yet still I had been living with my grandmother only.

I wasn't thinking about this subject all of a sudden or did it randomly. Just five days ago, I asked my grandmother if I could check the brown wooden box in the attic. Like every mysterious thriller story, she told me to mind my own business and study my days out so I could graduate and live life independently, instead of focusing on old and broken things stuck in that box.

Now that I had a little bit of hint by her torturing dialogue, I was now leaving my room, going up at night to check that box in the attic. I could have done it earlier on the other chances but I didn't have the key to unlock it. By God's grace, I had been a curious girl, checking out all the drawers of granny while she was out watering our little garden. And I found the drawer beside her bed that always used to be locked, unlocked.

And I found the key.

Now that nothing could stop me because Granny's room was at the ground-floor like most cliche stories, she couldn't hear me tiptoeing towards the attic.

Looking at this way too polished, wooden box on which the light of my torch was reflecting, I couldn't wait anymore. Twisting the key, opening the lid-I took a long breath of suspense.

The box didn't have much of a fright but some cute little toys, some photographs of a handsome man from his childhood to his thirties. There was a shirt from the eighties, cleaned and ironed. A magnifying glass, a pair of spectacles- one was broken.

I sat quietly on the floor, my long socks stretching as I crossed my leg and looked at the photos carefully when doubt started to appear in my chest.

This man looked like granny so much.

My jaws clenched as I felt a shiver crossing my spine. With an audible gulp, I checked more pics of this man's teen life. His eyebrows were as rich as of my Grandmother. The smile was the same.

For a girl, who had a beautiful family as I had just told, I wouldn't have really cared about these photographs. But I remembered a joke from three months ago when I was at my classmate, Lexi's home. We were studying and watching movies. In between, my friend's mom told her that they all were going for the vacations and not her because of her upcoming exams.

It was mean but not as much because we truly had exams this last month. But Lexi was in pain. She had quietly nodded and when her mom left she cursed and muttered if she was adopted.