Joy In Unlikely Places

"You think there is no joy in ****?" she asks, and when I don't respond she goes on, "It can be hard to find, surely. **** and loss can feel like a yawning hole in your chest. An absence that you will never fill but it is only painful in the moment because you are experiencing that loss for the first time.

"We are defined by those moments, as much as anything else. We wear those kind of losses on our body and in our mind and in our spirit and we carry them with us. When we lose, we feel. We feel..."

"Regret,"

I'm the one to say it, but I don't even really realize that I have said it. So two beats afterwards it registers with me that it is my voice speaking and I catch my breath, my eyes going wide as there is a sudden welling of it coming up from inside of me.

From the places that I hid it away. Because when you experience the pain of loss for the first time you form a small little hidden place inside of you that you keep adding to with each subsequent encounter with that darkly inevitable beast we give manifest to in cloak of black and scythe of glimmeringly sharp metal. Of **** and the container, that cupboard in your soul, is always too small to keep it in and when I confront it now it takes my breath away.

"It always hurts," I gasp.

"It does," she agrees, "For everyone. It hurts and you remember all the times that it hurt before. And even the moments that you forget that it should hurt are only temporary because then you remember that it hurts and it hits you over again like a wave and you feel, in moments of **** sadness, more than you ever feel in nearly any other moment."

"So how does that come with happiness?" I challenge her, "How do you find happiness in that?"

"You find it in the moments afterwards and the moments in the middle. You find it in the memories and the times where you stop to consider it. You find it when you look at those around you hurting too and you find it when you look to yourself and you realize that you too will pass, in time.

"And you find it in the solace that when you go, others will hurt too."

"That's dark," I shake my head, "Joy from others pain."

"Not that," she corrects me, "Not joy from their pain, but comfort in the fact that you can cause it in them. Comfort in the fact that you can... that you can be in their memory. Comfort in the fact that when your time comes you will be mourned, not forgotten.

"Life, your very existence, anchors you in the hearts of those around you. By being a part of it you become a part of them and when you go, when all of you go, you leave behind the memory of yourself."

She breathes slow. She lets her point settle.

But all it does is unsettle me.

Pushing my hands into my eyes I press hard enough that lights go off behind them and I feel pain and it's real. It's not the dull diffusion of a dream and it isn't incidental. I feel it strike myself in my chest.

And it squeezes.

And it hurts.

Just like it always does.

The Baba Yaga gives me a moment and I remember every face of every person that I've lost. The ones that I mourn and the ones that I, in private, revel in the truth of their absence and the ease that it causes me.

Complex and conflict rushing into me from all sides until I have to **** my hands down into my lap so that I can deny it, so that I can deny even the existence of it.

Because it hurts too much to bear and it shows too much of me to acknowledge.

Regret. Why is it that everytime I lose someone I can only regret their absence? Why is it that when they go I can only think of the moments that I've pushed them away and only think in terms of the things I could have done to keep them closer even if only for one more moment.

Why is it that, when I lose someone, I only wish I had a few more moments to make it right.

God, I spent a lifetime planning for the future. Broad and expansive plans with a trigger date in the future where I will pivot and start living instead of planning and each time that starting line was reached I ignored the crack of the pistol telling me to kick off into action and instead turned inward and started planning for the next moment.

Why is it that I can't just pull the trigger on being a better person?

Why is it that I'm never enough for me?

"There is happiness in every moment in life, my dear," she says, "There is happiness even in the ultimate sadness."

And maybe there is truth in those words but god they're hard to hear and I don't know if I'm ready to admit to them. Still it is undeniable that I have been gifted a second chance, even if it is in a way I never expected and a body I never dreamed of and for reasons, for a purpose, I don't quite comprehend.

But maybe I should start to listen, to give it a chance.

Maybe the only thing holding me back from action is myself.

She speaks, "Right now and this day you have been so fixated on one type of happiness that you fail to see all the moments that are passing you by."

For a limited time you can join my Patreon for only $2 and get access to over a month's worth of new pages of My Second Chance as well as NINE FULL STORIES with a new one every month! Join here: https://www.patreon.com/SophiePert