I don't know love

The old man emptied the drawers of the cabinet that had long accompanied his life. The stories he had written were somewhere in there, a draft of a romance, an outline of a children’s book, a poem he wrote while waiting in a doctor’s office, the book idea he had in the middle of the night that was never written, the stories that were shaped by his life.

After all the time, the cabinet was falling apart. The old man had restored it a few times, but the damaged parts could not be recovered.

Now, the bottom drawer, almost empty, holds the place of a single page. The page had no value on itself; it was no fancy paper, or even written with a pen. The handwriting, like the old man’s fingerprint, an unquestioned authorship. Still, the words didn’t seem to appear in any memory.

In the paper, a simple story came into view. The unknown main character describing his difficulty with love. As the lines progressed, the narrative began to feel familiar.

When he reached the end, his eyes watered, unable to contain it, displaying compassion for his forgotten character, whose life was just his own, written on paper.

On each passing day, something began to bother the old man; the forgotten story had a strong hold on his thoughts. The lack of ending, as well as the fact that his memory had betrayed him, kept him awake. In an attempt to quiet his mind, he decided to finish the story. Knowing that his story deserved a better ending, his life was not just what was on that paper.

“ Years later, you realize you were wrong, love was never about relating to love songs, knowing how to replicate the feeling on paper, or even knowing how to feel it all al. It was about watering a plant for a neighbor, feeding a stray cat, because you couldn’t take it home. It was about sharing a story with a friend, hugging a brother. It was about the little things life gives you, the things you share with others.

And a love story is just a slice of someone’s life, you can’t show its whole on paper. You can’t write a happy ending by putting a period on a happy part. The story goes on, even if you don’t like it.

You finally get to grasp the idea that a love story doesn’t need to be about romance. So you drop the pen and close the page, finishing the story. “

As he drew the last letter, he knew. He couldn’t keep it for himself, forgotten in an old cabinet, where not even memory could reach it. He had to show the world, show his own life story, show that life shouldn’t be defined by how you love, that life is not defined by one type of love. So, despite the unknown wish of his younger self, which he couldn’t remember. He declared his story, publishing it, to whoever wanted to read it.

Chewing on a pencil, the young man stared at an empty page in his notebook. He wanted to write, he wanted to write about love, hopefully with a happy ending. Still, a problem persisted; he had never experienced it firsthand. The young man had never held someone else’s hand, felt a spark appear, gone on a date, or even had a crush. Maybe a way to start it was, not knowing what it was. Maybe it was a way to tell a story.

So he wrote that, unintentionally shaping the character exactly how he felt, his lack of love, his secrets, secrets so deep he didn’t even know he had them, the way he viewed life. The words came with no difficulty, like a weight on being lifted from his shoulders and put on the words.

And as the pencil glided over the paper, the story began to appear:

“Falling in love was never easy for you, maybe because you couldn’t trust anyone with your feelings, or maybe it wasn’t time for you to love.

It all started in your teenage years, everyone’s hormones raging, lust in every face, but yours.

It took time adjusting to the jokes and laughter, to the names they called you, the isolation they caused. But as slow as the days passed, the years fled by. And before you knew, you had grown up, and despite all your prayers, romance hadn’t knocked on your door. It wasn’t like you didn’t look everywhere for it, like you didn’t hope that it was in every shadow in the corner of your eye.

Soon, you started giving up on it and looked to satisfy your need to love in other ways, living vicariously through fictional characters, friends, and your imagination. People said that “you will find it when you stop looking for it”, so you stopped, and it still hadn’t shown up.

As the hope slowly died, you decided, if you were not going to live it, you were going to write about it. So you wrote, and you wrote, and soon you knew every plot, every way someone could fall in love, every way someone could fall out of love. But it all seemed fake, mainly because it was, you never had lived anything like that ....“

He stopped, he couldn’t continue, he didn’t know how. His story was based way too much on his life. He feared that if he wrote that his character would find fulfillment in other types of love, it would seal his fate. And he couldn’t end it with him finding love, the character had become too much like him, it had become real, he didn't know how to write his own love story.

Promising to himself that the story should never be finished, that no one should ever read it, that it should be hidden. He put the paper in the bottom drawer of his cabinet, in a place where stories went to be forgotten, hoping to erase the words he had written.