i think i love you • matthew healy

27. happy

matty

you do learn quite a lot about yourself when you get to my age.

when i was about twenty-two i thought i already had all the knowledge in the world. foolishly fueled with weed and alcohol and girls that i had wrapped around my fingers for being in an amateur band... that turned out to be a completely stupid assumption, clearly, seeing as though i'm nearing thirty and the biggest realisation in my life thus far is that i know completely nothing.

that, and the realisation that i don't like where i am.

like mentally. physically. i don't feel happy.

and i know for a fact that happiness is incredibly fleeting and short, but fucking hell.

i think i haven't felt happy in a long fucking time.

i remember when george and i had come up with i like it when you sleep and i knew right then we were going to be fucking huge. and i told myself that i was going to be completely clean and spend all my money on expensive art and traveling and all that shit. that i was going to be happy.

but now... now i'm just a lonely depressed artist in my late 20s with heavy dependence on drugs and alcohol and finding ways to distract myself from myself.

but hey, look at me, i've got a number 1 hit on the radio, pretentious paintings on the walls of my bare london home, and a conventionally attractive girlfriend who i don't even have feelings for.

sometimes i look at myself in the mirror and think what life would be like have i not been selfish.

i wouldn't have gone deep into drugs.

i wouldn't have lost rhiannon.

maybe we'd still be living in that terrible flat in manchester, george would have moved out at some point and so would adam. having ross around would be alright, i suppose.

truth of the matter is, my friendship with the guys took a heavy strain because of my awful decisions, and i know it's been a year and life has changed drastically since then, but there are moments where i could feel their disappointment in me. and it's not a really nice feeling to have.

if i wasn't selfish, rhiannon would've still been with me. hell, i don't think i would've made a fucking record because i'd be so caught up in her. i wouldn't even be this famous, i suppose.

we'd probably get married on a whim.

and i could be working at a library just to give us both a good life. or a record store.

it's rather odd to me how all my life i've desired nothing but fame and wealth and power, and now that i've seen the world and experienced the things people would literally die to have, at the end of the day i find myself still, strangely, longing to come home to that shitty flat just to have her resting on my shoulder while we watch shitty television and drink cheap wine and smoke and cry because life doesn't make sense.

i suppose that's what happiness is supposed to feel like.

but i don't know. i keep getting this stuff wrong.

and i've no clue why it's only taken me this time to try and get things right.

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