you are utterly torn apart. your heartbeat seems to accelerate but time is trickling to a near complete standstill. are you still in existence? all around you, voices are getting louder; the soft whispers reverberate throughout your numbed, hollowed skull,  and occasional laughter crackles like thunder to your ears. you blink, and with the effort descends a paralysing paroxysm so excruciating you bite your lip, lost and alone.

the feeling overwhelms you. a definite feeling of loneliness, even though you are surrounded by people, by the crowd. a feeling of solitary despair, enveloping your entire being and folding its wings around you. and you shiver, the cold gleam in its eyes piercing right through you while you are at your most vulnerable.

what is happiness? you ponder the question in your subconscious. what is it really? is it a good thing, or is it something that crouches in the corner, always ready to pounce on you and hurl you into the fathomless depths? is it something you would want, something you would embrace, or something you would abandon?

you can feel the weight; the unmistakable pressure of an unidentified burden that is lodged deep in the crevices of your broken heart. your heart— it is a shattered mess blown into smithereens. you know that even if you were to find every shard left, you will never piece it back together, and even if you succeed, it won't be the same.

you are a wreck of sorrow, a maelstrom of uncertainty— abandoned and cast away. joy does not favor you, and hurt is too protective of you; it won't let you go. you are trapped, a definite prisoner within the limits of its palm. and maybe, you don't want to be set free. maybe, this is where you belong— in a world of darkness and misery, where you are tossed about by the storms of a merciless vortex.

the atmosphere is familiar to you, but you'd decided to give light a try. you'd opened your eyes to a possibility of joy— something you'd never had. you'd decided to try to be everything you are not. and in those moments, those transient, evanescent eternities, you thought you'd finally understood what "happiness" means. but you'd been wrong. you'd bitterly realized that you'd never been right about something and that hadn't been an exception. you attempt a laugh but it sounds like a choked sob.

the amaranthine disappointment is suddenly too oppressive for you— you can no longer drag the weight of the chains after a taste of your brief wings of freedom. the difference is too wide, a distance comparable even to the gap between temporariness and perpetuity.

the sky in your world has lost the bright vividness it had for the short stretch of time. time, you realize, is but an illusion. and you wonder, are you living in "time"? if time is an illusion, a fiction of someone's imagintation turned into reality, then where will you be, if not in "time"?

an endless gray drapes over the landscape of your world, condemning your entire universe into unending bleakness. of winters colder than Siberian nights and mornings darker than a void.

you leave footprints in the snow.

but you know that you are torn, broken beyond repair, jaded to the point of no return, and that you've gone further than the lines of belief that marked the boundaries of your once bright soul.

you will no longer believe, you will no longer trust. because you are the essence of sorrow itself, the epitome of despair and hopelessness.

you are what they call "life", and you finally know what "happiness" is.

happiness is a lie; a picturesque delusion of doom, of the dark unknown.

happiness is everything life is not, and it is your enemy.