Hide your happiness
I don’t like sharing.
Every time I do, there’s someone ready to spoil it.
To eat the last slice of a cake I made that I was saving for myself, to steal the scarf I had spent the past two months carefully knitting, to twist what had happened and tell me “they didn’t mean it, it means nothing.”
So I don’t like sharing my things, my experiences. I hide everything before they corrupt it.
My happiest moments are recorded in journals, I view them as pieces of my heart. They contain my truest moments, they are the purest fragments of my life, uncontaminated happiness. I place them carefully in cardboard boxes, along with every gift I have ever received.
Novels we both hated with pink roses pressed between each page,
Stuffed animals gifted for birthdays,
Handmade pop-up cards.
The only objects that hang around my room are ones that no longer make me happy. I should have stored them away when I had the chance, when they were still filled with joy. It’s too late now, I have learned my lesson.
The more I look through those boxes, the harder it is to keep them hidden. I only come across them when I give my room a deep clean.
After dusting, mopping, and tidying up, I lock my door and draw the curtains shut. Only then do I lift up my lilac duvet, with my back to my mirror, so my other self doesn’t ruin this moment. They are my memories. Not ours, not hers.
She still tries to look over my shoulder.
I don’t have much time, I’m careful to close the boxes and hide them before the sun sets, before my fears come to wish me a goodnight. They cannot know about this either. I need to be completely alone.
A whole other world that belongs to another version of myself. I read my favourite passages from each journal, each with a daffodil for a bookmark, intact after who knows how many years. Joys keeps them alive as sadness prevents the sunflowers on my windowsill from dying.
It is in these days that I add more entries. I tell myself about meetings after sleepless nights and surprise visits after lengthy separations. About random acts of kindness, when I was lining up to buy a book and the author happened to be there, in that very bookshop while I was there, and decided to buy it for me.
I could spend hours reliving these moments, if I could capture my very essence between pages, so I could truly live through them again, I would.
But the real world needs me. I have too many binds that keep me tied here.
Eventually, I close the journals and the boxes, and hide my happiness again, knowing I will spend the next days impatient, waiting until I can add one more entry, or relive another.