la grande bellezza / like a fucking dream i'm living in
WHAT YOU ASKED
Are you a happy person?
WHAT I SAID
Um. I don’t know. There’s a quote from Nabokov, the poem at the start of Pale Fire, that goes, “I think she always nursed a small mad hope,” and ever since I first read it I’ve felt it describes me.
WHAT I WISH I COULD SAY INSTEAD
As a baby, my grandpa gave me a second middle name, not legally but from his heart: Joy. He said I brought so much of it to the family when I was born. That I pulled them out of the dark depression they were in after so many years ensnared in a cult and finally leaving. I was a happy kid, by all accounts, but I always was inclined towards melancholy, even before bad things started happening to me. I think it felt like a world that belonged just to me, when my exterior life was cramped and shared and noisy and devoid of any privacy. When I went inside myself to the melancholy place, I felt lonely but free.
“Oh, I’m as lonely as the moon!” - me at age 3, recorded by my mom in her journal.
"The Favorite" by Omar Rayyan
Over the years my melancholy became something heavier and more formidable, a creature who slouches alongside me. Sometimes it feasts away at the beauty. Sometimes it devours me whole. It can get so bleak. You know this well - I can see it in your eyes. I wonder about how you tend to your own pet beast. Do you fight it, like I do; despite its wild nature, do you try to command its submission? Do you ever call for it to rest its many heads upon your lap, let yourself succumb to the sweet narcotic of its hot breath?
For a long time I felt happiness was a trick of the light, and so I thought I must prioritize other things. But now I think that was a bit of grandiose naïveté, or way to rationalize the ways I was abandoning myself. Yes, happiness is fleeting, but so is everything. Why should I convince myself that despair is more reasonable or real?
Now, when happiness comes to me easy, I revel in it. Even while I feel the fear of it slipping away from me and the fall from that high, I would rather ride the ecstatic wave than live in the low tide, safely bottom-feeding. And when happiness eludes me, I seek it it out like a North Star — a guide, yes, and one that requires my own action and navigation to follow, but more than this. I seek it like it’s a fact of the universe. As long as I exist, illumination is possible for me.
The great beauty, the wayward beast — they can feel at odds with each other, but I’ve lived long enough to know they are both part of my larger vitality. Long ago I had a boyfriend whose trust I betrayed by reading his chats with a coworker I rightly suspected he had a crush on. “She treats this like some epic romance,” he said about me, “and I just don’t see it that way.”
I fucking know it’s not, I thought. You think I’m fucking stupid? Then I cried for days because he was right, it was not some epic romance, not even close, but also for him to so terribly misunderstand me. Didn’t he see it’s all a game? Didn’t he know it was up to us, how we played it?
“The world is a playground!” I yelled at him in one of our last fights. “We can make this whatever we want!”
“I just don’t think I’m brave enough to live that way,” he said.
I’m a tremendously alive person. I welcome the range and intensity. It’s all a trick of the light, really. I reject the Stockholm syndrome of any emotion that hijacks me. Actually, motherfucker, I’m the one sucking the life marrow from the feeling. I plunge and soar, sink and float. I just ride it out, baby.
But god, I get lonely. As lonely as the moon! My mad hope, my immortal head, is to find someone whose approach to the game matches my own agility.
Could it be you? While you were fucking me, I wondered this. Did you see it my eyes, when you came inside me? Is that why yours looked terrified? Why you now won’t respond to me? Is it you? Could it be? I meant it — not just as a kink, but cosmically — when I said, Don’t you wanna play with me?
Ah, well. Back to the drawing board of death or alchemy. Good luck with your demon.