Flaw Salad

You can’t bear the words happy or love, or you can’t hear them, because they sound like something in a cheap, plastic toy or on the face of a cartoon bear with large, shining eyes that dances and sings and asks you to pretend this life isn’t so empty, really, because there’s sunshine in it.

Cloying, you say.

What’s sad—if that’s a word you’ll allow—is it’s not just the words you reject, is it? You reject love. You reject happiness. Unreal words for unreal ideas, and that’s the crux of it.

Maybe you think it’s all momentary flashes of pleasure or peace or fingers wrapped around yours, and you can describe those things—oh yes, you can describe them with beautiful words that swirl off pages—but you can’t believe it’s anything more than a scene followed by a scene followed by a scene until you die.

You don’t see how your scenes are symptoms of something bigger, something greater, something whole—a simple thing that can be painted in easy words, and that’s okay because sometimes easy words are enough.

I am happy. I love.

But we don’t speak the same language, do we?

No, we don’t speak the same language, and that’s always the problem in the end.