Illuminated.

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad." 

Why is it so much easier being sad, as though happinness is sand and sadness is water, and you grasp the sand but it falls away and flies everywhere, when you walk, the wind blows and your skin feels like it's being pierced by a million tiny, sharpened pencils and it hurts. But this still brings you some kind of joy because you see it and feel it and know it exists even if you can't have it. Water feels like your second skin, you splash and play and the water is so fluid, sheets of it all over you, you're covered and overwhelmed by it so easily, as though sadness melted and wouldn't stop hugging you. You almost forget to shed yourself of this until you realise the water doesn't dry, you stand before gigantic fans and burn under the sun, you scratch your limbs until they burst with blood, and with rough skin under your nails, you watch yourself, so hopelessly covered in water that sticks like jelly. It tumbles in laughter as you try to consume it but it consumes you instead. You stop thrashing wildly and you feed it instead, it grows as a part of you because you know no other way, you enjoy the inevitable and let go of the struggle of holding sand in your bare palms.