Happiness is so much like catching drops of water in your cupped hands - unlike catching it in a cup you can never really see it fill the entirety of your hands. Always somewhere outside the span of your notice some drops begins to make it's way outside of your hands. Through all the whirl wind of your joy some things begins to falter.
***
I am an escapist always eager to get out of things, never able to make bonds of true friendship or love with everyone I come across in the span of my life. Always afraid to get closer to someone, scared to death of experiencing real love. Frightened of losing someone, of feeling the crippling blow of losing someone.
But all these changed when I met Joel.
I can still remember exactly the smell of the old books and the dust in the library between the last two shelves at the left wing where I always spend most of my afternoons the day I first met him. I can still remember the strange angle the light came through the high windows. I can still remember what book I was reading - the very book that started our conversation that seemed to have lasted a lifetime. I can still remember the way he's ocean blue eyes looked at me almost melting me to non-existence that very moment. How he stood in front of me like a handsome brooding angel. I can still remember how my heart faltered and stuttered during that first conversation - the exchange that changed my view in life permanently. The date that changed that changed my whole life.
It was June four at a quarter past three - I knew this because it was the first Monday of the first week of the last month of the most tiring summer and because my mom would kill me for not making to my her wedding rehearsal for the third time. But at the time I didn't really care at all. I didn't care if the big fat world thought of me as an uncaring bitch. All I knew at that moment was how sick I was of having to go through this shit all over again for the third time. I just wanted to escape just like what I always do through the seventeen years of my life every time I feel like the whole world is about to collapse.
I've resorted to every escape there is but the only thing that I liked the most and stuck with me was books. It was my vice; my addiction. My escape. It is much better than any vice in the world. I could escape from all the misery of life by just diving into the other perfect world that the authors have made. Or even maybe to the its not so perfect world comforting myself with the fact that every story has a happy ending - a closure, unlike reality - there isn't always a way out.
The exact reason behind why I always skip to the end first before going back to the first chapter of a novel. And that was what I was precisely doing the moment Joel first came into my life.
"Cheating are we?" That was the first words he uttered to me.
I looked up to see and suspect that I have already died at that very moment.
"No," that was my brilliant response unable to form a coherent defense through all the confusion and stuttering of my heart. Back then I didn't know why I was reacting that way.
He chuckled, "Really? Then why are you reading the last chapter first?"
I couldn't help but scowl at him that time all my admiration vanished into thin air as fast as it make itself known.
"How can you be so sure that I just skipped to the last part?" I retorted.
"I can tell just by looking at you - at the way you pursed your lips." He said his eyes roaming my face. "And I can tell that you are about to put that book back in its shelf before I caught you. And also because of your defensive look right now. Which pretty much sums up my whole theory."
"Jerk," I muttered under my breath. "What makes you so sure? Are you some kind of mind-reader," I said sarcastically.
"No," he smirked, "I'm a psychology major at the state university here."
