Cloud Eating
Maybe to no longer feel sadness one should also forfeit happiness.
There is a peculiar numbness left over from the hole that used to rule my life. Am I happy to be "free"? Is this lack of pain supposed to mean that I am happy?
Remembering moments of my life, I think that I would trade happily-ever-after and dreamlike happiness for sustainable peace. Sometimes I think I never really experienced it. There has always been some hatred eating me apart from the inside, destroying itself and me.
Then there came a shroud of quietness... and a whisper on the icy wind wondered quietly, "Is this peace?"
When I lie in my bed, holding onto fragments of peaceful bliss, I do not recall those painful things. I do not feel a deep empty sadness pervading my being anymore. Sleeping all day, eating food I can afford, and walking with my own two feet to and fro from my own apartment... these things can be components of peace.
It also seems to me that hobbies stopped being a distraction from reality. The things that I like to do have the simple merit of being enjoyable. I do not draw to escape, nor to recreate. I can follow directions or I can color outside the lines and everything is good. Everything is okay.
Maybe this would have sounded like happiness to a former self. I always imagined that happiness was merely a lack of the constant ache from within my core. Having some semblance of that idea, I realize that happiness isn't a state of being...
...or if it is, it isn't something that I should strive for anymore. People always say, "Do what makes you happy." But happiness seems to simultaneously engulf and dissipate like a cloud. No one can consume a cloud. No one can be a cloud. Clouds can not belong to anyone... but they can be experienced in beautiful fleeting moments.
So maybe what I am trying to say is that when I don't try to be happy, I feel a calm quiet peace... it is seasoned with the strange salt of dried tears and dried up scabs of wounds perpetually healing and reopening... but the hollowness of my chest, although not filled, no longer aches to be.
These days it feels like the burdens of a former life have miraculously lifted, and all the hunger has been satiated. I have overcome the famine of childhood, and have somehow found that I can be sustained by simply breathing...
...but there is also the occasional cloud.
There is a peculiar numbness left over from the hole that used to rule my life. Am I happy to be "free"? Is this lack of pain supposed to mean that I am happy?
Remembering moments of my life, I think that I would trade happily-ever-after and dreamlike happiness for sustainable peace. Sometimes I think I never really experienced it. There has always been some hatred eating me apart from the inside, destroying itself and me.
Then there came a shroud of quietness... and a whisper on the icy wind wondered quietly, "Is this peace?"
When I lie in my bed, holding onto fragments of peaceful bliss, I do not recall those painful things. I do not feel a deep empty sadness pervading my being anymore. Sleeping all day, eating food I can afford, and walking with my own two feet to and fro from my own apartment... these things can be components of peace.
It also seems to me that hobbies stopped being a distraction from reality. The things that I like to do have the simple merit of being enjoyable. I do not draw to escape, nor to recreate. I can follow directions or I can color outside the lines and everything is good. Everything is okay.
Maybe this would have sounded like happiness to a former self. I always imagined that happiness was merely a lack of the constant ache from within my core. Having some semblance of that idea, I realize that happiness isn't a state of being...
...or if it is, it isn't something that I should strive for anymore. People always say, "Do what makes you happy." But happiness seems to simultaneously engulf and dissipate like a cloud. No one can consume a cloud. No one can be a cloud. Clouds can not belong to anyone... but they can be experienced in beautiful fleeting moments.
So maybe what I am trying to say is that when I don't try to be happy, I feel a calm quiet peace... it is seasoned with the strange salt of dried tears and dried up scabs of wounds perpetually healing and reopening... but the hollowness of my chest, although not filled, no longer aches to be.
These days it feels like the burdens of a former life have miraculously lifted, and all the hunger has been satiated. I have overcome the famine of childhood, and have somehow found that I can be sustained by simply breathing...
...but there is also the occasional cloud.
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