is this happiness?

I think this is happiness.

In the dim glow of a Los Angeles twilight, Sarah stood at the edge of a balcony in the Hollywood Hills, the sprawling city beneath her looking like a sea of flickering embers. She took another violet pill, feeling the familiar numbness creep over her. The pills were her only escape, the only way to dull the sharp edges of her reality.

She and Jack had moved into the house a year ago, back when everything seemed like a dream. Jack was a writer, or at least he wanted to be. He had grand visions of penning the next great American novel, something in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson. But instead of words flowing from his mind, it was mostly anger and frustration. He spent his days raging at the world, chasing the high he could never quite reach, and she was always there, caught in the crossfire of his manic energy.

Sarah had her own demons. She was wild, untamed, and her soul was restless. Jack often said she was a hard woman to keep track of, a hurricane of emotions that he could never fully understand or control. Their love was a storm, unpredictable and violent, yet it was the only thing that kept them tethered to each other.

But love wasn't enough. The pills, the late-night fights, the endless cycle of highs and lows—it was all wearing her down. Sarah watched Jack spiral deeper into his madness, writing obsessively, trying to capture the essence of cheap thrills and hollow dreams on paper. But every page was a reminder of his failures, and it only pushed him further away from reality.

One night, after another fight that ended with shattered glass and bruised egos, Jack pulled out a gun. He always kept it close, a symbol of his control in a world that felt increasingly out of his hands. Sarah had seen it before, but this time, something in his eyes told her it was different. There was no rage, just a deep, hollow despair that mirrored her own.

She felt a wave of cold terror wash over her, but she didn’t move. Jack placed the gun on the table between them, a silent challenge. He was tired—tired of the struggle, tired of the endless search for happiness that always seemed just out of reach.

Sarah stared at the gun, then at Jack. The man she once loved seemed like a stranger, a broken shell of the person she used to know. But wasn’t she the same? Lost in her own pursuit of oblivion, swallowing pill after pill just to feel something, anything, other than the aching emptiness inside her.

“Is this happiness?” Jack whispered, his voice cracking under the weight of the question that had haunted them both for so long.

Sarah didn’t have an answer. She reached for the gun, her fingers trembling as she picked it up. The cold metal felt heavy in her hand, a tangible manifestation of all the pain and sorrow that had been festering between them for months.

She thought about their life together, the highs that never lasted, the lows that were too deep to escape from. Was this all there was? A life of fleeting thrills, of chasing something they could never truly find?

“Witch Hazel, Witch Hazel,” Jack murmured, a name that had become a private joke between them, a bitter symbol of the betrayal they both felt. He had once promised her the world, and she had believed him. But now, all that remained was this—two broken souls, locked in a tragic dance of love and destruction.

With a final, shaky breath, Sarah pointed the gun at herself. Jack’s eyes widened, but he didn’t move. He was too far gone, lost in his own despair to stop her.

“Is this happiness?” she asked one last time, knowing the answer but needing to say it aloud, to hear the words echo in the emptiness around them.

Jack didn’t respond. He simply watched as she pulled the trigger.

The sound of the gunshot shattered the silence, and in that moment, Sarah found her answer. But it came too late.

As Jack stared at her lifeless body, slumped on the floor, the weight of what he had lost finally hit him. He reached for the pills she had left behind, crushing them in his hand. The novel, the dreams, the cheap thrills—it all seemed so pointless now.

He swallowed the pills, feeling the numbness take over. Maybe, he thought, as he felt the darkness close in, they would find happiness in the next life. But in this one, it was nothing more than an illusion, a fleeting shadow that they had chased until it destroyed them both.