The Happiness — Modern Love Letters
People talk about the eternal pursuit of happiness as if it should be the ultimate goal for human beings.
People believe happiness is something to chase, to hunt, to run after — rather than something that just is.
So we struggle and we hustle, we put in the work, the hours, running, running, and running, grasping to every tiny bit of something that even resembles that feeling of happiness.
We never quite seem to catch it, however.
Because happiness, very much like love, is not something you have to fight and cry and bleed for.
It just is.
One just needs to recognize it.
Also, it’s not just about hunting for happiness — it’s also about demanding it.
This is what fucks.us.up.
While we chase and exhaust ourselves in the search for happiness, we also demand it ferociously from others. Too often we forget that literally no one owes us anything.
Again, much like love, you don’t have to ask for happiness, to beg for it, to cry for it.
It just is.
Of course I didn’t know this at that time.
Now I know. I should’ve taken everything from the wonderful experience I was going through, and just feel it.
Let it touch my skin, rush into my blood, right down to my bones.
Yeah, I didn’t do that.
Sometimes, even though I’m very smart, I can manifest very stupid behaviors.
Here’s what I did then:
Rather than just be, rather than look into those dark eyes of yours and memorize every shade they had, I would think about the clock.
That clock, that fucking clock, that would never stop ticking, no matter how much we wanted him to do it.
We are sharing the last smoke in the pack. It’s already 5 AM.
Your apartment is really cold, dude, I mean it, you should check that heating plumbing thingy you have installed.
My bus is arriving in an hour and I haven’t started to pack anything yet.
Because I don’t dare pack.
Of course, being the You that is You, it’s obvious you see me lacking the metaphorical balls on this one. So you just do it for me, while I watch you from the balcony, thinking, feeling, waiting.
I’m also watching the sky and wondering how much time will have to pass till my sky can be yours again.
As a side-note, I always took pride in being able to enjoy everything 100%.
Passionate and alive.
Well, I lost the gift after that rushed goodbye. It’s like I forgot it in your apartment, just like I forgot my books and half my clothes.
I left my magic at your place, in the ashtray, in an empty bottle of vodka, in the unmade bed or in the bathtub.
You should retrace my steps and find it, it might be useful some day.
I left your city thinking that whoever said that being in love = butterflies was probably never in love — because we felt very differently.
We didn’t have butterflies, we had a storm of pterodactyls fighting in our guts.
It was worth it.
What came after, when we accepted that it was love, not lust between us, was the most relaxed period of our story — and it took us one whole year to get there.
I’ll give us this one — even though we were very slow to accept we caught the feels, when it finally happened…we kind of made our time together explode into a billion stars. Everything was then, all the stuff that happened, happened then.
Such happiness and such freedom should be forbidden, it has the potential to kill a normal human. We were us, of course, so that wasn’t the case, but it was a lot to process— even for us.
We created a small universe, just ours, in a time which seemed stolen.
Us, the empty train station, some beggars on the street and you saying that you loved me.
As I said, no one owes us happiness. No one owes us love, either.
You just gave. A lot of both.
You just are. A lot of both.
And I’m so fucking grateful for everything.
