I don’t believe in happiness.
I want to-
I never said I didn’t want to
but I just don’t see it.
Not for me.
The idea of its purity seems like a sick joke, a ruse to bring you in, but leave you in a self-made prison wanting something else but just making do with what you have. Silent suffering.
I’m not quite there. I’m not quite here either.
I’m not quite, but always looking for something
that I can’t describe in words.
Something that feels like bathwater without the razor... something that feels like the pain was never there. Something that feels like privilege and comfort and softness of hands and hearts.
I want to feel, for once, that I wasn’t hardened by a trial of childhood. I want to feel worth your time... anyone’s time... I want to feel like I was a priority. Not a lost cause. Not a lost and found teddy bear.
I don’t want to be the last kid waiting outside for a parent that forgot he existed- too busy watching TV with a third bottle of wine to bother with him.
I want to feel fake thoughts of myself as a young boy. Memories of giggling and running and scrapes from park swings and backyard hide and go seek...Not the real and imagined scars of the actual reality of that young boy. Relied on for everything, for love and support and a whipping post for when things seemed out of control. I was silent and dutiful
I don’t want to hurt anymore thinking about a past that's still mostly blank. I want to talk to myself, hold his hand, my hand, and tell him that it’s going to be alright; tell him that someday people would see him as useful... but that child would roll his eyes.
That child was tougher than me. He was living every day. Fighting to stay safe. Taking scraps. Learning to survive. He made the best of it.
He never hoped for too much. He knew disappointment and hollowness and fear, but still, he got to school on his own- maybe late, but there, red-eyed from no sleep and hungry and distracted and alone in another way but he was there.
I don’t want all that. I’m tired of being “one of those” stories. I want normalcy. I’m so damn tired of being a story of partial resilience, a
I want my reality to be blissfully unaware.
Confident.
Loved.
But I’m destined for pain, forged in fire. Self-doubt, self-hatred, and self-destruction folded into the steel of my soul. A smile without a soul. Bullshit up to my eyeballs.
Pete Townsend’s most famous line. Knawing.
