We Weren't Born To Be Happy, But We Can Make It So

1
I want to be a soft thing.

I want to pry away the hardened metal that I’ve grown over the years to protect myself. I want to cough up my crystallized organs. I want my skin to be soft enough so that I can rake it away and plant dandelion seeds below the epidermis like rich soil. The only way to grow is to be soft, to break the red-tinted goggles that I’ve welded in place affixed to my head. I don’t want to wear them anymore. Light bends strangely. People always smile with blood-stained teeth. When I wear these goggles every kindness grows a monster.

So I take them off.

I bleed when the screws come out of the back of my head, but it’s a good hurt.
I drive 80 mph to the beach in the new car, with the puppies in the back and the road glittering ahead of me. I play Glitch Mob over bluetooth and I know that later I’m going to go home and write and I wonder what I truly have to be upset about anymore. All the misery I carry is on the inside of my robotic shell, gumming up my works, ancient circuitries that haven’t been cleaned in decades.

The sun shines differently here - clearer, brighter, shadows in new dimensions.

2
I’ve said this before. When I imagine the writing life I do not imagine: Conventions, panels, sitting across a table from famous writers, book signings, endless classes, hustling for money, t-shirts with my face on it, arguing about book covers, complaining that my publisher doesn’t pay me fast enough, fans asking me what the secret is, finding the coolest blazer, cigarette ash stuck inbetween the keys on my keyboard, days when I can’t write anything at all, Facebook messages asking why I’m not paying attention to you.

What do I imagine: A sentence that I run over my mouth and my head. My brain’s a rock tumbler and I twist and turn in the night, falling through dreams until the words shine and all the roughness is worn away. Look. I wake up and the sentence tumbles out of my lap, the color of a rainbow.

3
You always imagined that your hard work would amount to nothing. That you were doing all of this to compensate for living a life that you didn’t deserve.

I will paper the world with these words: You do not have to make yourself small in order to justify your existence.
Did you hear me? Let me repeat myself. Imagine the words throb like your heartbeat after you wake up from a recurring nightmare.

You do not have to make yourself small in order to justify your existence.

Don’t refuse the cake, don’t say ‘It’s whatever you want’, drink the tea, say no to the toast, tell the waitress she got your order wrong, don’t say everything is alright when it’s not, accept the invitation, flip your hair, wear the red lipstick, sleep where you want, only say sorry when you mean it, eat the cheez-its because you don’t have to keep diminishing in your own skin, wear the bold print, pick up the weights, pick up your body, get out of bed, run, run, run, run, run, scream when you get to the finish line, look up to Mount Olympus with spite in your eyes, stop living like your life is one big apology.

4
Being unhappy is one of the easiest things in the world.

You hide your unhappiness behind bright eyes, nights out at the club, vodka and Patron, whip your hair to bright lights, smile at that boy like you’re asking him to not bring the knife down. You’ve got a little cocaine in your nose, bleeding inbetween your thighs. You want to write, maybe paint something, do something differently than you always imagined, you’re sick of the club, the late nights out, your job, but that’d require you to sit down for a moment and confront the starving animal that lies behind your mind’s eye. It’s ragged bones at this point, hissing spit, cries when it sees you staring back at it because it doesn’t trust you, and for good reason.

It’s not your fault. We weren’t born to be happy, we were born to survive. Content animals lay down and die. Happiness is just around the corner. It compels the machinery of the body to move, breathe, eat, search for happiness behind the crest of the moment so that the moment can be strung to another moment and we’ll keep on going.

I think of Dante’s Inferno. I think of Dante’s Inferno a lot more than I assume the average human being does. It’s quite a lively place in hell - lustful people blown about by winds, priests in boiling rivers. Except until you get closer to the center, to Cocytus, where the worst of sinners - the stiller and quiet it gets. The betrayers are frozen in ice, unable to move.
Nothing to do but being confronted by your own thoughts, that’s the worst of the hells. That’s where true terror resides because the enemy that you face cannot be externalized.

It’s too bad that’s where you’ll find happiness. In the still ice where your own personal agony exists, wearing the face of a shudder eyed, tongue lolling demon that looks an awful lot like you in the right light.

I’m sitting at my computer and listening to chill trap and sipping black cherry Kool-aid while a glowing nightlight splays like northern lights across the walls. I can see my dog sleeping in the hallway and my boyfriend is in the living room and here I am writing about happiness and I can feel that I want the moment to stretch out into a fantasy across a hillside that gleams.
But it never will.

I can feel that I’m here, that this moment is both interminable and infinite. I’m actually here. That we will never move over the crest of presence. I take a deep breath and for once I feel okay with being alone, that I don’t inhabit the diorama of an imagined happiness with its resin sheep and fake grass and a yellow lollipop representing a sun. I inhabit here.

It was once hell here, a frozen world on the path to an enormous devil, waiting to torment me in its quiet with a shuddering crunch of its black teeth of its membranous webbing of nightmare. I did everything I could to make it miserable here. I ripped out the flowers and cheered at the rain. I tried to distract myself with bad boyfriends and videogames, but there would always have to be a time when I was alone with myself and the thing I'd’ created. My own little hell, my actions and thoughts swirling to encase me in the only product of their creation that made sense. I imagined hell so I could live in nothing but hell.

Now, well, it’s tolerable.

5
Try this:

Go outside and look at the sky and then close your eyes and listen to the noise and feel the way it hums on your skin and touch the ground and remember that you are alive even when the bars close and she goes home and the sour taste in your mouth and the pounding headache is telling you that you should’ve drank more water last night. Feel the way your heartbeat is part of the noise of the entire world, feel the way your blood mixes in with the sensation of all creation.

Are you afraid something in the center of the careful world you’ve created might change?