Happiness

I’m in your room and I open your eyes.
In front of my face is a picture, leaning on the wall, lying on the floor.
“Being normal, not fabulous, is the real challenge” is what you’ve marked on it with an indelible felt tip. I’m reading it with one eye open.

Today is September, 24.
I stretch my hand under the bed.
If I’m not wrong, last night my phone fell over there.
We’re smiling from within the screen, he and I, the sea is in the background.
“It happened today” is the third thing I see after turning to you and stroking your hair.

It happened today: in 2016 even instruments of torture have become virtual.

People are passing out there, outside the window, complaining about how difficult it is to park around here, on a market day, and other bullcrap.

I’ve been commissioned an article on happiness. I thought I could outline it in a thousand different ways, different from this way.
At any cost I wanted to include sentences I liked very much, taken from what I had written down, for sure untrue and not highly relevant, I know, but remarkable.
This is me.

It has been said that “Theatrics and deception are powerful weapons”.
Indeed, I wanted to do it because I’m basically a self-centred liar.

I’ve been commissioned this article several months ago, scheduled for October. Every time I started working on it, I tapped ctrl+f on my inspiration archive, looking for happiness. The folders that always opened were a painful farewell in the doorway at my place and a question, which the man I thought I would be married to always asked me.

Suddenly I remember being commissioned to write the story of a girl who is choked to death, because this is my greatest fear.
And I’ve been suggested to practice sincerity, because I omit too often.

A lot of people connect happiness to perfection.
I used to do the same, me too.
I was living perfection.

Those were moments I dreamt about when I was a teenager, when I was truly in love, but it was not the kind of love I thought was “right for me”, or at University, when love was completely missing.

A year ago I was living perfection, thinking I was living happiness.
As happiness is a dream coming true. Isn’t it?
My dream was suffocating.

He didn’t say “this happened today”, anyway.

I forget my mobile while leaving your place, where I had started writing an article on happiness, truthfully, telling about such a girl fearing being choked to death. When I realized this, I immediately thought three commissioners in one go would be disappointed. How funny.

I’m meeting some people who will ask me what I’m doing here, and I’m running late.

While going back to get my mobile, I’m thinking about your words again:
“Being normal, not fabulous, is the real challenge”.

Finally, when you realise that most of the people, the situations and the things surrounding you are those who help you keep your balance and define your normality, you’re already happy… Even though you’re not aware of it.

You don’t want to escape anywhere,
Neither to the best place ever, nor to the perfect boyfriend.

You don’t feel suffocating.
You don’t want to omit, you don’t need it anymore.

Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture