side effects

You know that feeling when you know you’re having a great time, and you sort of leap out of that moment, float above yourself for a while, while sounds of the scene seem to have their volume lowered? And you--this floating you--think: this is happiness. When this moment is over I will remember it as happiness. You know that feeling? Of course you know it, every Lifetime movie exploits this.

I wonder if anyone's recognized happiness without dissociating this way, without separating themselves by time (memory retrieval), or by perspectives (feeling someone else's joy). It seems that happiness, that flighty temptress, must be viewed with one degree of separation. Like it's an explosive we must wear protective goggles for. Like looking directly at it would be blinding. Like it is sunshine. Or a basilisk.

I wonder what happiness, pure and unfiltered, would taste like. When someone first discovered pure oxygen, he inhaled it and found it so delicious he said it must be what the gods breathed. Of course, as a human, it also made him highly flammable. I wonder if there could be a similar ambrosia for happiness. I wonder what its consequences would be.

**

dobbin

I’m reading Vanity Fair. There’s this character, honest Dobbin, who loves another girl unconditionally, but she has given her heart away to a man who treats her like dirt. I just finished a scene where he leaves for a long time, and she doesn’t even ask where, because she, although a nice girl (perhaps the nicest in a 'novel without a hero', is too wrapped up in her good-for-nothing husband and the child he left behind. Here, Dobbin comes to bid goodbye to kind Amelia and her son.

“The cruellest looks could not have wounded him more than that glance of hopeless kindness. He bent over the child and mother. He could not speak for a moment. And it was with all his strength that he could force himself to say a God bless you. “God bless you,” said Amelia, and held up her face and kissed him.”

Thackeray always manages to distill human nature to only the essential. Who hasn’t had a Dobbin they’ve passed up? Who hasn’t been a Dobbin themselves? My heart breaks for him when she kissed him not knowing how important it was, how even the best of us get so absorbed in their own egocentric ignorance! How one-sided even the most intimate moments of life can be.

**

reptilian living

I went through my old college journal tonight, with actual handwritten entries for the first half. It's amazing how much was forgotten, or suppressed. I was so groundless for a while. The sense of being lost was almost leaping off the page. And I actually felt a kind of anxiety to save that girl from a directionlessness whose magnitude even she did not grasp. It didn't matter that I knew, rationally, that the girl was the one leafing through the pages, and she is fine.

The stickiness and lingering criss-crossing strands between the past and the present have always frustrated me. It would be so much easier if time were discrete, and not continuous, like somehow the artificial units of hours and weeks and time zones we impose upon it actually chopped it up. But I've yet to find anything as unforgiving, unrelenting, and immutable (including my tiger mother) as time.

Yet, seeing as how much I view this past girl as a separate person, it's almost as if time had loosened its iron-grip claws for a second, and the not-so-distant past had broken free. It feels so gratuitous, I hardly know if it is to be believed. Are versions of the self really so easily shed and discarded? Can one slither away unscathed? Or is it a practice only suitable to reptiles, while Eve looks on in jealousy?

**