Happiness Is Fleeting
By Aman Basra
Happiness is fleeting. It’s that line on the heart monitor that ascends to the highest peak but falls just as easily, if not sooner. It’s that spike in your blood sugar level after an unlawful amount of chocolate. It’s the deluded caffeine high after one too many cups of black coffee. It’s transitory and it’s short-lived. It will pass soon, and when it does, it will hurt. But not like those clichés of suffocating lungs and broken hearts. No, this hurt goes something like this.
There will be anxiety and you will be an infusion of nerves, susceptible to the slightest trigger. Each feeble disappointment, each missed bus or train, each misplaced item, each will be a catalyst.
And you will cry, no poised whimpering, but heavy sobs that will make you tremble. Your chest will ache, you will scramble for tissues, but you’ll never have enough. You are always lacking, always behind in the essentials. This realization will reinforce the failure that is your existence and reignite the sound of your pain.
You will collapse wherever you are descending, on a sidewalk at midnight after running too many miles. On an empty seat in an empty train at an ungodly hour while you search for home or on the floor in your closet, basking in the safety of its darkness. You will reach for the physical of the concrete and the cushioned seat and you will lean against the walls of your closet and hope for some stabilizing effect. You will subordinate yourself to the force of gravity, hoping it will save you and weigh you down.
You will close your eyes then, hide from the visualized complexities defined in your setting. You will want the blackness that comes with closed eyelids; the color of the world is too allegorical. You will want to be numb, but the tragedy of your unfulfilled desires only continues. You will always feel, feel, feel. You will always bear the authenticity of raw emotions. Your senses are always heightened. You cannot escape. You can try, you can run for hours on empty highways while the world sleeps. But no distance, no speed, no time will suffice. You will search and search amongst the shadows for that one non-existent streetlight. And even if you miraculously find it, it will flicker momentarily but then die. Because light is not a trajectory permanence; it succumbs to darkness as do you.