In the dark days, you were afraid to be happy.
Fear of the unknown was second nature, nothing more than common sense. The darkness holds dangerous things, and unpredictability will eat you alive. It has before. It will again.
It took you a very long time to remember what it was like to be happy.
You weren’t always sad. Always is a firm, solid, undeniable label, and you were never good with those. Your life has never deserved such stern labeling when it feels as if you have spent all your years somewhere in between. Not always sad, but not happy. Not sunshine bright, not midnight dark. Your only discoveries were different shades of default gray.
The dark days were a fog, but they were what you knew. Anything to upset the fog was something to be feared. Anything that upset that mundane rhythm was something that took from it. Change is loss. You learned to fear it, to hate it, knowing it has taken from you and it will take again. You are a giving person; you will give every single piece of your soul to someone who will rip it into shreds that you must pick up and put back together again. The world is not a giving world. It has always taken and taken and taken, and each time it leaves you broken, searching for glue to hold your collection of shards and fragments together.
Happiness is change. Change is loss. How can you not fear holding onto something that will slip away in the blink of an eye?
You’ve been left behind too many times to count. Perhaps happiness was the first real intangible thing to leave you behind every time your world shattered. It preceded the departure of sleep and laughter. It made room for anxiety and nightmares and every dark thing that crept forth from the edge of your mind when you weren’t looking.
When love left you, it took happiness with you, and joy’s departure took everything else. It’s a matter of self-preservation - cautious protection. You’ve been hurt too many times to be hurt again. And yet, every time you dare to let it in again, you are.
It hurts to know you are so easy to forget.
You hold tight to your ideals in the hope that they will protect you. You do not leave your loneliness for fear of what else will leave you. To be alone means that you cannot be touched. To be alone means that there is no avenue the world can use to take from you. Instead, you take from yourself. Is that not better? Is it not better to waste away of your own volition, rather than allow someone to take pieces of you with them when they inevitably disappear?
Most people have found a way to leave you, even those who swore they wouldn’t. There are very few left now, but they are trying to prove you wrong. You are trying to believe them, but some days the dark days return, and then you are not convinced that the cycle will not repeat itself once more. The unpredictable becomes predictable. Happiness becomes fear. Change becomes loss.
Many parts of your world have not changed in these last few years. She is one of them. She has always been there through the worst, though you know she was too young to truly understand all you went through. For a very long time, she has been the only one you really had. Perhaps you are the only one she really has, too.
And then you become less easy to forget, and then you wonder if the universe has decided to play another trick or finally, finally, show you kindness.
The dark days become fewer and farther between. There is no loss, but there is no change. You wonder what it would be like to change. You wonder what it would be like to venture beyond the bubble you have created for yourself - to expand.
But you are afraid, so very afraid, to let yourself know happiness.
Smiles slip to your face and sleep stops its restless dance, and you are wary. Why would you not be when getting better means getting worse? At the end of every brightness, there is a tunnel; but at the end of every tunnel, there is light.
Life is a balance between good and evil, bright and dark, joy and sadness. Perhaps life has been off balance for too long. Perhaps, this time, you will not be the fool.
Even after it all, you’re cursed with the burden of hope. It never really leaves, does it? You’re still here. After it all, you’re still here, so hope must be, too. Even when you are convinced you have left it behind, even when you are certain you will not be played for a fool again, it remains. Stubborn, insistent little thing. The last little secret in Pandora’s box - the only way to survive everything it released.
You hope. And you try. You smile and laugh and your eyes do not look so dark anymore. The routine is still routine, but it is softer and kinder. And maybe, just maybe, you can be happy.
Sometimes the world takes and sometimes it is kind. You have always tried to avoid the unknown; it’s why you worked so hard to learn how to read the future. But sometimes it evades you, for sometimes things are simply not meant to be known. Sometimes they are bad things, but you are learning they are good things too.
You might always be a little messed up inside. You think there will always be some missing parts of you; there will always be dark things at the edges of a brain that is not a normal one. But you learn to push the dark things back.
And when you push them back, it becomes easier to try again. To let yourself be convinced. To let yourself believe.
It comes down to this: happiness is not something to be afraid of because love is the antithesis of fear.
