Winter Without Happiness

Happiness was my lover before the dark times.  Together we laughed through carefree, barefoot days and her hair sparkled in the dappled, spring sunlight.  Our lives were tangled up in the soft intimacy of quiet comfort, secure in each other and our places in the world.  Every activity, no matter how mundane, was made more beautiful with Happiness in my heart and by my side.  We felt certain our days would carry on as blissfully as the summer roses unfolded in the mornings.

Photo via Flickr "roses" by Samantha Forsberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Autumn brought with it a hint of the dark times to come but we bundled warmly and laughed in the crisp winds that playfully threw up leaves for us to dance in.  Happiness found beauty in the smallest things and the bite of the rain on a sharp edge of the wind simply reminded her she was alive.

Photo via Flickr "autumn and you" by cherry-vn licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

The dark times descended with a powerful suddenness that was inescapable.  Brooding clouds swept low with the same fateful thunderous wind that tore Happiness and I asunder.  Straining to reach each other and being dragged off by the dark, roaring winds of change, our hands, the last things to be torn from one another, our lonely, empty hands, haunted my memories.

Dragged reluctantly into a private war I fought many lonely, cold and dark battles.  I walked barren paths without companionship and the warmth of hope.  I had lost Happiness to the vast, lingering darkness.  What hope was left for me?  I wished for her sake she had found someone to share her days with and all the while I resigned myself to the lonely gloom being my continued lot in life.  I was a prisoner of the darkness and there was no hope of escape.  Memories of Happiness would float unbidden to my mind in the small hours of the lonely morning.  Bitter loss accompanied the heartbreaking longing I felt for Happiness.  I had once found perfect and beautiful ease in her company and the loss tightened my chest with memories of the dreadful, inescapable moment when I lost everything for which I cared.

Photo via Flickr "darkest path" by Mrs Janet R licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

Somehow, amidst threats of still worse ends, I was released from my captivity.  I cared not that I was free; life was wearisome without Happiness.  Aimless wandering down tangled and dark paths seemed to lead further into the darkness.  My loneliness and lack of hope were complete.  I trudged on with tearful footfalls amidst the overgrown, winding way.  The fates were nudging me forward to better days though the overgrowth served to hide the gradually lightening skies from my view.  Hopeless and weary I moved with unnoticing and heavy tread through leaves that Happiness, had she the misfortune to walk this road, might have found beauty in.


Suddenly, it seemed so suddenly, my path ended in a town I no longer recognized as home.  Did it feel familiar because I had been here before or because all days were tinged with a familiar bleak and weary tint?  I cared not.  Tales wound through town of a worn out, empty husk of a person who had wandered through the darkness so long they no longer remembered the light.  One such tale reached Happiness.  She mourned for this broken soul and something began to glimmer in her mind, the first hint of hope that it might be me.  If the darkness could relinquish one soul it could relinquish me.

Photo via Flickr "roses" by PHOTOPHANATIC1 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

In a way my inner darkness was a spectacle.  Intriguing and self-contained it was a safe danger that drew spectators with its mystery.  Slowly pieces of my tale circulated in swirling dark eddies through town.  A poor soul, parted from Happiness, doomed to walk a weary world alone.  The story of my loss finally reached her and a whispered name of who I used to be.  The wind brought it to her ear.  The wind also whispered to me, Happiness, was all it said.  But somehow I knew that she was in reach.  I began to weep; all the tears I had not dared to feel in my loneliness and all the hopes I barely dared to believe could no longer be contained.  I shed my black mantle and walked haltingly to stand in the sunlight.  I will look for Happiness again.  And ever since Happiness heard my name, she has been running through the streets trying to find me.

Photo "Spring" by Madder Hatter licensed under CC BY 2.0 

“Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.” Hafiz of Persia

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This short story was inspired by the quote from Hafiz of Persia “Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.”

It struck me suddenly that I've grown up thinking of Happiness as a teasing woodland spirit who is ever fleeing from your grasp, at her best, and at her worst, as never showing her face so that you doubt her existence.  I loved the idea of Happiness actively seeking you out.  This beautiful quote immediately reminded me of parted lovers and thus this story of parting and longing and hopeful reunion was born.

Photo via Flickr "Italian roses" by Steve Batch UK licensed under CC BY 2.0 

It is not for me to write about the reunion.  This is because you and I, we are each of us the protagonist, and the story of our separation from Happiness may be similar, but the story of our reunion with Happiness will be as unique as we are.  All I know is that Happiness is trying to find you and it is up to you to step outside into the sunlight and write your own reunion story.