The Strange and Twisted and Deranged

Whenever I am sad,  I find that all I want is to steadfastly hold on to this feeling of sadness because I fear that I won't have it for too long. Sadness, unlike happiness, is a familiar emotion. An emotion that I crave. I like myself more when I am sad. So to satisfy this craving, I project sadness onto things that don't have anything to do with melancholy. Like how alone, even in the company of others, the stars seem. Sadness, for me, represents several things: the need to be alone; the packing, unpacking, shelving, reshelving, arranging and rearranging of dreams; the repairing of broken hopes that I never knew I still kept; and as unoriginal as it may sound, the motivation and inspiration to create something, anything. And so I hold on to sadness for however long it chooses to stay. But with the impermanent nature of emotions, it is hard to hold on to it. So in the absence of my own melancholy, I seek it in literature, in music and in films.

While I have spent a huge part of my life trying, with fervour, again and again, to chase happiness, I have never been certain that I have ever fully attained it. And so in the privacy of my own thoughts, in the dark recesses of my mind, several questions sit unanswered: how does happiness feel like? What does happy look like? To appease my inquiring mind, I've settled on the absence of misery. It's not sadness. And it's not quite happiness either. But every so often, I'll experience something resembling happiness. But I rarely enjoy this fleeting emotion. I merely pause to revel in this feeling, to try and understand it and before I put it into words, it rolls off to the edge and my reflexes are never fast enough to grasp it before it tumbles over the precipice and into the free fall. It's the sudden disappointment that quickly replaces that happiness, however fleeting,  that keeps me from falling over. These are the times that I am acutely aware of the ephemerality of life. Nothing lasts forever. Even happiness. Especially happiness.

The title of this post is from the song Crying Lightning by Arctic Monkeys.