Suddenly these days, I have detached myself from the hanger labelled with my name. I'm not sure if I remain who I am...or rather, who I was. This incongruity remains the common denominator amidst every other filament intertwining to become this semblance of being that is myself.
'You are so unhappy' having markedly resounded the past weeks, maybe months, a proclamation that broke the hearts of two most definitely, and perhaps even more than two for the fluttering effects of the butterfly upon those whose lives are so interconnected. But two, it certainly did.
I am not sure what this state of being happy is, not quite so well as I once believed I did. What, I ask, as the snow furiously falls and gusts in the middle of April, when the month was supposed to bring us rainshowers to usher in the warmth of blooms and blossoms anew, what is happiness?
For I had in my hands the shattered remains of what I had believed was happiness - and I was not entirely unhappy. When we break our happy, is it ever truly broken? When our happiness has joined the shadows of darkness, is it ever truly and completely gone? Can this phantom really be something ever entire devoid and separate from us?
I am in another process of metamorphosis. At times, I feel a throbbing heaving sensation to sob, and sob, and cry - and yet, I do not know entirely why. And at times, I feel the most incredible sense of peace. Of oneness. And contentment. And for this too, I could not fathom a cause or reason.
In one moment, I felt, I could have lost it all. And yet, I am still here. And to merely exist - what could I say I had really lost? A momentary release of overclutched desires - a stubborn refusal or a longstanding habit, it made no difference. My dreams I felt had burst in billions of pieces and I could not tell whether it was a celebration of confetti, or piercing shards of glass.
And I felt nothing.
To consider the magnitude of the process. The actual thing itself - it was in effect the thing I felt that would kill me. And to this moment I remain. To consider that these numbers, so many of them, so much that they have enumerated a sum that could cause a prolonged state of disillusionment simply by itself - are the many years that I have led myself along a leash in belief that my happiness was such.
My happiness, I believed, or had started building in belief from a very young age, was firmly and thoroughly founded in love. All else in life I felt were mere trivialities for without love, I could not be complete, nor fulfilled, nor happy.
And then I found love. And I died every death I had died in those many long years - the pains, the hardships, the aches, the wounds, the tears, the sorrows, the anguish, the torment- they surged upward again and again in the throes of my fallen state, and they healed.
They healed because the simple cauterizing effect of love merged all pains into one huge ball of fire of what defined the 'before' and submerged itself in the cooling waterfalls of cascading love to reemerge no longer inflamed but defining the 'after' by the mere juxtaposition of proven endurance.
This is a story that will be understood those who have truly loved. Or have loved, somewhat untruly. For what is or is not true? That we only decipher, somewhat haphazardly, in the whispers between the heart and mind.
Now I feel our moments are slipping out of grasp. Like an infinite cascade of sand particles falling, and falling, and falling, I feel that they are all slipping away, and that I had been the only one trying to catch them all before they were lost. And it took me awhile, but then I realized that it was just me, only my two little hands that were trying to keep this from totally slipping beyond our grasp. And it was not both of us.
And now I have let go. Let the cascade go wherever the hell it wants to go; because I should not be the one to hold on so tight to what is meant to be held on by two.
It is falling. But it is still there. I do not know where they go, or if they run out, or if it ever stops.
We don't need to try, your voice says, because whatever is meant to happen, will happen.
And for some reason, I am learning, even as the tears fall, that happiness is still there. Even despite the tiny ways the pain shoots through in spontaneous and unpredictable ways, I am curiously free. I have given up on holding on, and yet holding on has not given up on itself. Giving up has not tendered itself for attendance.
Happiness does not really need to mean the absence of sorrow.
