🌸 Kamini Diaries — The Girl With the Book of Moods (By Kamini Diaries)

     

The Girl With the Book of Moods

The library smelled of paper and rain. Outside, dusk was settling over the KIIT campus, and the trees were swaying as if the wind itself was whispering reminders of old lives. I had come here only to escape the noise of my flat — to walk among spines of books the way some people walk in gardens.

At a corner table, under a soft cone of yellow light, sat a woman. Her face was turned down, but her presence reached me before her eyes did. She was reading Mind Over Mood, a book that once sat like a mirror in my own hands. The title alone made my chest tighten.

I told myself I was only curious. But every few minutes she would glance up — not searching, not scanning — just lifting her eyes as if to check if the world outside the page still existed. And each time she did, our gazes collided and fell apart like fragile glass.

I could have stayed at my table and pretended to read.
I could have let her be another almost-meeting in a life full of almosts.
But something inside me — the part of me I thought heartbreak had stolen — stood up.

I walked towards her slowly, my pulse drumming like a secret. She looked up again, this time not by accident.

“Hi,” I said, my voice quieter than I’d planned. “How are you finding Mind Over Mood? It’s… a heavy book.”

Her lips curved into a small, surprised smile. “It’s honest,” she said. “My friend recommended it. She’s doing her post-grad in psychology here. She thought it might help with my… moods.”

I nodded, the corner of my mouth lifting. “I know that book. Someone once thought it would help me too.”

“Some meetings don’t ask for forever — just a quiet corner, a book, and the courage to begin again.”

That was how it began — not with flirtation, not with performance, but with two wounded souls comparing maps. We talked about therapy without shame, about authors without pretending to be experts, about mood swings and the ways we try to read our way back to ourselves.

Every so often, a boy would walk past and glance at her. She was beautiful in that unshowy, quiet way that draws attention like gravity. It made me oddly protective, but also strangely calm. I didn’t need to dazzle her; I only needed to be here.

“I’m Kamini,” I said finally. “And you are?”

She told me her name — a sound like a sigh — and where she came from. She had been in a four-year relationship that had just ended. She said it as if it were a fact, but her fingers trembled slightly around the book. I didn’t recommend anything else. I didn’t try to fix her. I simply listened.

We sat like that for a while, two strangers in a room of strangers, but our table felt like a small island.

When she got up to leave, I wanted to give her something — not a piece of advice, not a demand for a promise — just a breadcrumb of hope. So I told her softly, “When you’re done with this, there’s another book you might like. The Untethered Soul. It’s about letting go of the noise inside your head. It helped me breathe again.”

She looked at me for a moment, her eyes darker now but also lighter. “Thank you,” she said. “Maybe I’ll find it.”

We exchanged numbers — not as a transaction but as a quiet permission to meet again. She left, and the library light shifted. The chair opposite me was empty, but it didn’t feel like a loss.

For the first time in years, I felt like a part of myself had walked back into me.

I stayed for a while, staring at the pages in front of me without reading. My heart was not racing; it was steady. Outside, the first diya lights of Diwali were beginning to glow.

Some meetings are not meant to change your life.
They are meant to remind you that your heart was never broken,
just waiting for silence to find it again.

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(End of Chapter)