To B,

I keep telling myself that I am okay. That I am perfect as I am. That, everything about me, everything that I can be for now, is as perfect as it can be. I breathe happiness deeply, like she is the flower that blooms in rain, and I savor her taste on my lips and tongue. I feel light like happiness, I feel bold, brave and bright. On some days, happiness lets me float and the skies have never been bluer, the wind not more careless, the sun never as lambent.

It's the most wonderful and pleasant feeling.

I love to smile, I love to hum, I love the pattering of the rain on my terrace, I love the sun smiling through dark, heavy clouds. I wish I were like the sun, smiling through every dark cloud but nay, I am the cloud itself. I rain when I am too heavy, I rain when I am too dark. My happiness is so fleeting. She wilts like a facile child, soft minded and lush like my white hanky.

It's been more than a month, since I have let myself be blanketed by loneliness. Yesterday he came, he suffocated me with his bare hands. I thought it was the end of happiness. I thought she would never bloom. My eyes showered, little pinpricks of ugliness hurting my chest. I heaved like the dark clouds in the sky, the calm gone now that the storm was here. I swallowed every rain drop because I feared hurricanes, I swallowed every rain drop as they came for I feared the thunder they would call. I drizzled within the confines of thickets shaded by my feeble arms, the sea and the oceans merging to become one. I kept raining for if it could wash away all the ugliness in my heart and mind, all these insecurities encroaching my head to destroy the blooms of happiness, then I would let it. I wish it were that easy, the cause of the rain, will be dissolved by the rains herself. It's a pitying thought but it's not an unhealthy one. The ugliness in my head, pains my self. I pray for a reprieve and when I smile thinking it's gone, and that I am okay, it comes chasing me all over again. Like it never left, like it's my shadow that will leave me only in darkness. I keep running from it, I escape from my own ugly realities in search of a smiling sun in every face I meet, in every stranger that holds my hand, in every friend that hugs me close.

I miss those three days of last month, when you attached me to the spring of joy, when smiles came so easily to my face, when I was not easily fazed by a stupid comment or a stupid question. I miss what I felt for you, however fugitive it was. It was a lapse in my moments of happiness wherein happiness, fresh and pink, danced to the rhythm of your smiles and gazes and for that, dear stranger, I thank you.

I thank you.

Yours sincerely,
FA.

______

©VioletEden

15thAugust2017