A Feeling Fomerly Reserved for Musicals

who thought contentment could come from coffee mugs in the cabinet? (image) my vintage pentax

Lately, I spend all day in a blissed out kind of contentment where the warmth in sunshine, or an arrangement of things on window sills, or music (its like I've never heard music before!) makes my heart do a little leap in my chest. I feel like at any moment I might burst out in song and everyone around me will know the spontaneous choreographed dance routine to accompany me.

When I think back to the last year I feel a weird kind of empathy for myself and the hurting I was never without. It's as if that was someone wholly different than who I am; a hollow ghost of a girl who saw the same buildings glinting off the waterfront and felt, for a fleeting second, that elusive thing I now know. But it was followed by pain in it's stark contrast; like the pleasure after itching something. Even the stretches where I wrote about being happy or changed, I wasn't. Because this, this, must be happiness, and I was so far from it before.

I look around when I'm on the bus and I wonder how many people, smiling, talking people feel the way that I felt in that time. I want to hug them, I want to them what I wish I could have said to myself : That isn't all there is. You won't always be longing, or guilt ridden, anxious, or lonely. Happiness is real.

It's so heartbreakingly real.