Let me tell you about this world we live in. We live in a world so unabashedly complex that it dillutes our concept of what is important. It infects us with a mental sickness so pervasive and so potent that we become lost in the spectrum of our own emotions to the point that we are somehow completely unable to identify what makes us happy. We become fooled, tricked into believing that there are things more important than happiness and forget completely the simple notion that feeling happy in any given moment makes the moment a bright one. We overcomplicate the emotion, overthinking what it really is without realizing that happiness is far and away one of the easiest sensations to identify. It is easy to be happy in the short-term, and most people haven’t forgotten that, but the moment someone began to purport the unrealistic assertion that such a thing could be perpetuated forever—or for any extended length of time, really—the once-simple emotion took on two very different definitions and the human psyche has never recovered.
This is because the world is populated by cowards. People who are afraid to take a chance. People who don’t know what is good for them because they’re confused about what happiness is. They get so lost trying to “figure out” life as though it’s possible and would rather waste their years in the familiarity of their own solitary emotional disarray than take a chance, intimidated by the fact that it just might work. I know what it’s like to live that way, and you can do it, but you’ll end up learning the same simple lesson I did in a needlessly difficult way: happiness feeds off of happiness.
If you, as an unhappy person, find yourself surrounded by other unhappy people all the time, you will be fighting a losing battle and getting more and more confused about what it takes to be happy every single day. It is a miserable climb full of rose-coloured deception and trickery—peaks and valleys like you wouldn’t believe. Like nobody would believe, until it happens to you. This isn’t the fault of the people you hang around with, mind you—they are your friends and they are your friends for a reason. If they all happened to be unhappy, it’s not your fault, but it won’t do you any good either. Which is generally why people make new friends, I guess.
You have to take responsibility for what makes you happy and recognize what an important role the other people in your life play in understanding that. You have to recognize that you make friends with people because they make you happy and you make them happy—that’s the unwritten rule that all friends understand. Most importantly, though, you have to recognize that when the friends that you care about are hurt, you must remember that you have the power to make them happier and that in doing so, you too will feel better and your lives as friends will carry on.
Love is the simplest form of happiness because you are free to exchange any obligations or responsibilities for a sincere conversation. It provides you with an emotional safety cushion unlike any other and is priceless in value because it does not waver in the torrential winds of the rest of your life. Always, you have someone who will hold you when you’re broken down and tired. Always, you have someone who wants to be with you when it seems like nobody else is. Always, you have someone who actually cares about you, will hold your hand, not be afraid to touch your face and will tell you that everything is going to be okay, even when it’s not. The only people who seem to understand how much that’s worth never have anything to say about it. I guess that’s because you don’t realize it until you really are broken down and you really are hurt, but when you reach out for the hand you need to hold, it’s not there.
In conversation, it’s easy to explain how important “the little things” in life are. All you have to do is make a vague reference to something everyone enjoys, like popping bubble wrap, and then follow it up with a question like, “are these and other little quirks about life important to you?” No doubt, when you frame it that way, they sound pretty important and most people are likely to agree. Rarely though do we really consider what life would be like when some of those things are actually gone until they finally disappear. A cliché that has been beaten to death by its sheer durability—its absolute unwillingness to die. A cliché about appreciating what you have whose lesson we never learn despite widespread acknowledgment of it as truth.
In love, a million clichés all come true at once and require no explanation. Out of love, a million different clichés all come true at once, but we reject them because we believe our own circumstance to be unique and somehow exempt from universal rationale. Well, you’re not special. Don’t think you can justify your actions based on your circumstance. You can’t fool me, happy couple—you can tell me that you’ve found your true love all you want, but I’ll know it’s bullshit. I’ll know that it’s not your “true” love because no such thing exists—I’ll know that what you found was love and good for you, but I know that love exists everywhere for those brave enough to grab it. So, you’re not special—you’re just wildly disconnected from the millions of embittered single cowards in the real world where love is a scavenger hunt and not a lifestyle. And I envy you.
I envy you, but I’m not fooled by you and for that reason, I wish that you would see cause to envy me and what I’ve learned. Then maybe you, happy couple, would understand what you have and how hard some people will fight to get it. Then maybe you’ll stop and think before making a big problem out of a trivial one. Maybe you’d think a little harder and remember why you love them when you look into their eyes. And maybe every time that you’d hold them, you’d do it as though you may never hold them again. As everyone should.
Finding love should radically change your life expectations. It should be a trump card that feeds the other forces in your life, not a byproduct thereof. Obviously, it doesn’t change your life instantly, but it definitely changes your plans and goals and inspires you to fulfill them at any cost. Because you know it will be worth it. If you do not understand this about love, you do not know what it is. If you reject the chance to find love, you are a fool.
However, if you lived lonely, confused and unhappy, but then found love, understood it, understood what it means to be happy, lived happily for so long that it becomes natural, then have it taken away suddenly, without explanation, spent years mortified as to what and why this happened, finally getting the chance to resolve it, coming to terms with what happened, then finding out that the “resolution” was really just another unexplained “fuck you”, dwindling into a pathetic lifestyle of perpetual loneliness, finding no one to blame including oneself, but punishing oneself anyway for lack of any other reasonable conclusion, then walking around every day for years feeling so alone that every step is a heavy, sluggish waste of time, nobody wants to hang out with you, not a girl in the world will so much as bat an eye at you, nobody wants to hear your story and by then, you’ve told it so many times that it’s meaningless, and then suddenly, a glimmer of hope appears and you meet someone who enjoys spending time with you, actually phones you to make social calls after years of virtually nothing like it, then the friendship grows and the taste of love dances across the tip of your tongue, but it’s not love, it’s actually a demon in disguise that represents not love, but deception, and so you become bitterly familiar with the game as the players have chosen to play it, fucking around with heavy emotions and pleading ignorance to get away with it while you sit on the roller coaster and get driven to the top just to be thrown back down without a seatbelt, the ups and downs leave you exhausted, frustrated that the world could be so cruelly unpredictable, then you descend into the familiar state of solitary loneliness, joining all the other cowards, becoming resigned to the fact that the world is full of cowards and coming to terms with how much pain such cowardice causes, idly drawing your attention away from the insurmountable mountain that love has become in your mind, subtly dividing your efforts between an increasingly fruitless quest and the responsibilities of everyday life until love seems almost meaningless, a dream that I once had perhaps, long-forgotten, but then hurriedly brought back into focus by meeting someone that not only wanted to spent time with you, but even shares your frustration with love and the ridiculous and immature way the people in the world handle it, bypassing the social hurdles that put road blocks in the way of love for countless people, defying every bitter truth you’ve come to believe throughout the journey, clearing up the confusion that clouded your thoughts for so long, challenging you to open up, and finally you don’t have to worry about what happened in the past and you don’t have to worry about the hopelessness of the future, because finally everything seems to make sense, and finally you’ve found love, it has found you, and in doing so, it has made the most confusing and challenging thing in the world shockingly simple and hugely rewarding, and you settle down, and its effect on how you plan to live your life begins to set in, then you too are a fool. All the sincerity in the world won’t prevent it from collapsing on you. All the trust, all the times you’ve had—even those great specific moments that seemed so amazing at the time—will not matter and you will be fucked over for doing nothing wrong. It will not make sense to you, it cannot be explained to you, but it will happen and you will be helpless and confused and once again, a fool. A fool for not seeing it sooner, a fool for believing “I love you” when you hear it, a fool for saying it and meaning it, a fool for trusting anyone at all and a fool for thinking that your story is special and that this time it wouldn’t be like all the others.
You won’t fool me again, world. Not by your watery eyes, not by your cheeky promises and not by the artificial lights shining brightly along the corridor of this endless black tunnel.
