Letters To Emotions

A Letter To Happiness, My Lost Friend

Dear Happiness,

Hello, old friend. I haven't seen you in a while. I miss you. You and I used to be best friends. Do you remember that? You were always present, especially when I needed you the most. You and I walked hand in hand along the smooth paved roads but as soon as the path broke, you left. How could you do that? The road just keeps getting more and more broken with every single day that passes. Now, as I walk this highway, crumbled pieces of pavement get stuck in my feet and I leave bloody footprints in my wake. But, and you might be curious to know, I am not alone. Sadness and Anxiety walk on either side of me. Sadness is composed of different shades of blue and purple and I might have called it beautiful if it wasn't my companion. The thing I've come to notice is that we, as faulted human beings, tend to admire Sadness but only when it is someone else's friend. We look at a broken human being and find the beauty in the complex hues of blue and purple, but when Sadness joins us, we only see it as ugly and parasitic. We see it as an awful disease and we desperately try to get rid of it. And yet we admire the crystal tears that fall from another person's eyes and we wrongly romanticize Sadness, for it is not "beautiful". It is a contagious plague that infects us all the very moment that you abandon us, my dear Happiness. Let me tell you how Sadness walks with us. Sadness never leaves, and it never abandons us. It walks with me, holding my hand, its fingers made of razor blades that dig into my palms and my fingers and my wrists. Sadness loves physical contact. Did you know that? Did you know that it loves tracing its fingertips down my hips? I think it likes seeing the crimson color that blooms beneath the path of its destruction. It loves kissing me too, bringing its hungry lips to mine and sucking the life out of them. Poor Sadness, it doesn't know that it is killing me. It only wants affection. And it does receive affection, but in a wrong and twisted way.

Anxiety is quite the same, but slightly different. Anxiety is afraid to get close at first, but then its fears get mixed in with your own and you tend to keep Anxiety by your side all of the time. Anxiety is never lonely because it is always present, always lurking behind me or in my head. Anxiety is quite rude, as a matter of fact. It doesn't call before it visits and it doesn't care who or what it is interrupting. It loves talking, by the way. Anxiety has a problem with running its mouth. It keeps rambling on and on and on about my problems and when I try to talk them out, it only makes things worse. Anxiety points out the flaws in every situation and gives me scenarios as to what can go wrong. It never gives me scenarios as to what can go right. I try to be polite, I promise. I always try to calm it down, but it is no use. Anxiety can never relax, not fully. There are times when Anxiety is quiet, and I believe that is when it sleeps. But when it wakes back up again, hell breaks loose and I am left shaking and gasping for breath with Anxiety peering over my shoulder, its hand on my back in an attempt to soothe me. It talks to me at moments like that, saying things like "Don't worry, it can't possibly get much worse than this." Funny how its words never comfort me.

I miss you, Happiness. You only visit me briefly. You never stay for more than a few hours at a time, if I'm lucky. Perhaps you don't like who I keep as my company. Need I remind you why I am friends with these monsters in the first place? Please come home, I can't do this without you.