As Yoongi took a stroll through the peripheries of the vast sprawling villa, he couldn’t help but wonder how much money must have gone into setting up the entire place – the mansion and the huge garden which never seemed to end. He came to a place that descended to a lower ground, he made his way down a set of wooden paved stairs that ended in a path where the grass had been cleared and this led to a fence beyond which a part of the adjacent hills was visible, etching a brilliant picture. 

“Wow!” Yoongi said in a whisper, as he made his way up to the fence. He tested the strength of the wooden rails and ensured that they could hold his weight, he leaned against the fence to look down. He gasped in delight at the small scenic pond that appeared in his vision, down below just by the edge where the hills ended. He realized that his spirits were finally lightening up. The talk with Namjoon earlier had messed up his peace and he had decided to take a walk to clear his mind. 

All of this luxury. All of these riches…the perfect house, the perfect family…and yet, how your happiness can be ruined. Just because of that silliness called love. 

​​​​​​Yoongi sighed, resting his side against the fence and soaking up the warm rays of the afternoon sun that greeted his face. 

Jungkook and Jimin…they’re both perfect examples of how people fall in love to get doomed. 

Just like my mom.

​​​​​​
Yoongi scoffed, and a picture appeared in his mind, which brought back a flow of memories. The hated image of a metal box that his mother had under her bed in his old apartment.
……………….

Yoongi’s mother had taken special care to change the topic, whenever any mention of the trunk had come up in their conversations. She had scolded him in his childhood whenever he had tried to go near it. It had “old rusted stuff” that might “hurt him” if he tried to rummage through it. She had warned him against “stirring up the dust” on the old contents of it as she didn’t want it to get in his eyes. As he had grown up, he had developed a sense that stopped him from ever asking her again about it.

When he was seventeen, his mother had been hospitalized because of a lung infection and long lasting fever. The night before she was to be released, Jungkook’s mother had asked her son to accompany Yoongi to his house so that he could pick up a set of her clothes from their house, while she stayed with her friend.

Inside his mother’s room, he opened his mother’s wardrobe and chose his mother’s favorite dress, fondly imagining how happy she would look wearing it the next day, as he brought her back. As he was about to close the door to the wardrobe, Jungkook had pointed to something on the ground beside Yoongi’s foot and he had looked down and found a silver key that had apparently slipped out of some corner of the wardrobe when he had been shuffling through his mother’s clothes.

“Hyung what’s that for?”

“I think I know.”

He had asked Jungkook to wait outside in the living room and closed the door, before kneeling down by his mother’s bed and pulling out the metal trunk from under it as slowly as possible so that his friend wouldn’t hear the noise from outside.

He tried to insert the key into the lock on the trunk, his heart pounding wildly in his chest and found, with mixed feelings of excitement and apprehension, that it opened the lock. He waited a moment before opening the lid, wishing mentally that it was not what he had fathomed.

As he lifted it slowly, and the diffused light inside the room found the contents inside, his eyes filled with tears. He extended a shaking hand to touch the cloudy glass covering an old photograph that was held in a frame, chipped at the edges from wear. It was a photograph of a man with a beautiful face and a tall a frame, standing with a hand around the shoulder of a strikingly pretty young woman.

The woman in the picture was his mother, possibly in her twenties. The look on her gorgeous face was carelessly exhilarated. She had her arm around her man’s waist and anyone who would see the picture without knowing the people in it, would never have a shadow of a doubt that these two young people must be madly in love with each other or that they would have a happily ever after.

After keeping the photograph aside, he pulled out, one by one, a set of clothes for men that had undoubtedly been left behind by his father. Under these, were three diaries, the pages of which were frayed but the neat cursive writing on them still readable – his father’s name was written on the first page of one and each page filled with poetry.

He read a few lines and wondered with an intense pain in his chest, how it was possible that a man, who could describe love in such excruciatingly beautiful words, had actually held it as a joke in his mind.

He picked up the second one and found that it was similar to the first one, but the third one was different. It had his mother’s name on the front page but in the same cursive handwriting. He turned the pages and went through the poetry, each one of these having been dedicated to his mother. 

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Jungkook, who had returned, worried why Yoongi was taking so long. Caught off guard, with tears in his eyes, Yoongi quickly threw back the contents of the trunk into it and closed the lid, locking it up again and shoving it back under the bed. Rising up and wiping his eyes he walked over to the cupboard and threw the silver key back inside before closing it.

Jungkook, then fourteen, had stood there staring at his Hyung with a scared look.

“Hyung, what’s wrong? What was all that? And why were you crying?” He had asked, stepping up to Yoongi and placing his arms on Yoongi’s shoulders, taking in his Hyung’s distress, with a miserable look on his own face. 

“Jungkook ah, will you listen to me if I tell you something? Don’t ever fall in love. Love is the biggest deceit. If you want to be happy, don’t ever love anyone enough to ruin yourself.”
……………………….

 A loud chirp of a bird, flying back to its nest, brought Yoongi back to the present from his flashback. He drew in a f