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Article excerpt March 17, 2018
On Happiness
Anonymous

On the flip side of human suffering, of course, lies human happiness. It would be futile to discuss what happiness is; it is simply too vast and scattered-about. What would make for a more fascinating article, as I hope this one is, is how happiness comes about. Are there perfect circumstances that must line up to result in the often-fleeting chemical reaction in our brain that we so crave? Are we in control of these circumstances? Are there diminishing returns if the circumstances are different but the happiness is the same?

Happiness requires suffering just as suffering requires happiness. Sometimes they may even be dependent on each other: suffering produces happiness, just like in exercising, and happiness can produce suffering. These may not always be conscious choices that we make, but the world inflicts them upon us.

What makes happiness different from suffering is that it takes a lot of it—or a lot of time—for it to be all-consuming. Hard-earned joy only grips your heart for at most a day before it peters out into nothingness, what more for simple delights we stumble upon during the course of our days? This is why we seek it. This is why we bend our backs until we break them in order to taste what we know is like nothing else, and this is why we try. This is why we seek the truth despite knowing that it is the sharpest thing of all; we will heal from its wounds faster than it pierces us.

This is why we become brave.

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April 4, 2015

Satoru hears his new roommate close the closet door in their room. A second later, he hears a muffled voice call out, "Okay, that's it for my clothes. Are you done with yours?"

"Yeah!" Satoru responds, walking into the room and almost crashing into Suguru. "Woah there," he says, sidestepping to lend the other boy some leeway. It's going to be hard, having to adjust to another person inside his room. They checked the house prior; it wasn't like they didn't know that the space was going to be a bit cramped for the two giant masses that they were.

Suguru doesn't go out of the room. He seems to be considering something.

Satoru nudges him. "What?" He says, leaning his entire weight on his friend. He feels an arm snake around his shoulder to steady the both of them. Satoru beams to no one in particular and places an arm exaggeratedly around Suguru as well. "I'll take the top bunk," Suguru says. "I know you hate having the light in your eyes."

He detaches himself from their little half-tangle. "No, I'm fine with whatever, I promise."

"That's not possible though. I've already made up my mind."

Satoru raises his eyebrows in mock challenge. "Yeah? Well I can change it."

"No you can't," Suguru replies, also raising his eyebrows, "because I already bought stuff for you."

Before his mind is able to generate a decent reply, Suguru's already pulling him down to the floor and pointing at the top of the bottom bunk where an assortment of luminescent moon and stars are glowing weakly. A single sun is pasted at the center of it all.

Satoru sits down properly on the floor and starts tracing them. They're definitely those glow-in-the-dark things you buy at the surplus store on a good sale day, but they were more than that—within a few moments of Satoru seeing them, he already thinks that they're containers of everything he'd never asked for from Suguru but was given anyway, simple acts of...love? Friendship? Care.

Suguru cares.

He feels the bile rise in his throat.

"What do you think?" Suguru says, looking at him expectantly, but he has nothing to say. Wrong. He has everything to say, and it's bursting at the seams, and it's too much, it's too much, oh, why is he feeling this now—

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