I imagine happiness; I imagine that it was stolen by a
robber. And now the whole world is seeking this thing that the robber stole but
you see the robber is selfish and wants to keep it to himself. But here is the
catch since the robber is always on the run even he can't enjoy the happiness
he stole. That what you would call a Greek tragedy.
I imagine happiness to be something elusive, deceptive. If
happiness had a gender it would be a woman, seductive, alluring mysterious, and
always out of reach. Happiness is Gatsby reaching for the light of Daisy's
house. "His dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp
it." But he did fail to grasp it.
Happiness seems to me like death in Markus Zusak's novel,
hovering over our world, picking the one she chooses while the rest of us jump
up like school children, "pick me, pick me" we say but it doesn't.
Happiness might be a goddess, spurned by her lover and now
she turns us all down because she is angry because of that one guy who let her
down.
I sat down to write a story with a happy ending. That's all
I aimed for. All my poems and stories are so sad. I imagine my stories and
poems sleeping under flyovers shooting drugs into each other's veins. I imagine
them as uncouth foster kids roughed up on streets, bare toed, clothed in filthy
rags. I imagine them as that one tough prison inmate whom nobody talks to
because of his dead eyes. I imagine my
poems and stories as suicides never reported and bodies never discovered.
So yeah my story. No happy endings. I failed to reach
happiness even in my fictional world. How hard is it to write "They lived
happily ever after?"
Yet I couldn't write it. Something say's to me. If you write
this sentence your whole story becomes fake.
"It's a fictional story," I say to it.
"But it's not fake." It shouts back.
And of course, I realize that It is right. So instead of
writing "They lived happily ever after" I write "maybe someday
they will be happy… maybe someday sorrow will leave them."
Like sorrow is some 100-degree fever and one day we will
wake up and we will be all alright? All of us will be alright?
Fuck.
Anyway, my aim wasn't to waste your time.
I wanted to ask what happiness is. Where do I find it? And how do I write "Happily ever
after" without feeling guilty of forcing an unnatural inorganic ending?
I wrote this story for a very special person and I thought
in my fiction we will find happiness but it eluded us even there. Even in our
imagination happiness eluded us.
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