I Am Fickle With Happiness. They Say You Don’t Know A Good Memory Is Happening Until It Ends, But I

You would sit by and watch the world burn if you could sit comfortably while you did it. That is the curse of comfort. That our couches are stuffed with the same filling as those in coffins.

Scales painted like fingernails in an array of cobalts, blacks, and periwinkles danced around me in reflections and refractions in the crystal clear water. She circled me, playing with me, I thought. Though I know now she was playing with the sun, and I was a lowly witness, only in the way of her serenity. I didn’t intend to startle her when we met eyes, it just sort of happened that way.

When you wear masks like you take breaths, you don’t notice that the act is killing you. You don’t see the bags under your eyes, the redness invading your scleras. The undying tug on the corners of your thin pursed lips. You see only the delighted faces of those so pleased to see not your face, but the faces you adorn for them. Catered to them. For some, the mask you wear is a mirror, for they want nothing more than to see themselves in you. For others, black as night to obscure anything akin to their likeness. But you are so enraptured with their happiness, you neglect your own. For there is a worse fate than being unloved.

It is being loved as something you’re not.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

What a pretty little lie we peddle children as loves are ended by mouth, laws are written on paper, and wars are declared in ink.

The black beetle lies on its back, stomach burning by the tips of the sun’s low hanging fingers. I flip him over with my broom four times, and he can’t manage to stay upright. It could be the wind knocking him over, or the cracks in man made stone unfamiliar to his nature bound feelers. Or it could be that he just wants to die and I have to let him.

What is love but the desire to feel sunlight through their skin. And hold there.

I seldom feel the words he says, I’ve steeled myself to any emotion he may try and peel off of me like loose flakes of skin. It is too tough now, calloused to the point of no return. Even his softness though, is lost on me, I feel no warmth or cold. He has forced me to this numb state. He has taught me that feeling leads only to pain.

My innocence was taken by hands no bigger than my own, another child who’s eyes swam blue with cold apathy. She couldn’t have known what she was doing was wrong, for I recognize now, the same things were being done to her. How can I raise my fists to the one who hurt me when she had no innocence to begin with, and I had something to lose. She was damned from the start.

Lucky for you, there are people far more forgiving than your inner critic. May they find you and show you the softness you cannot show yourself.

Nostalgia is not a cradle, but a coffin.

Rest carefully in its lacey black box, and be sure to take care when you visit those no longer there, to not join them thinking all new happiness is lost.