I used to think that happiness was a way to commune spiritually with hidden things whether those things be of the self, the forest, the heavens or uncertainty itself, whatever that is, and so, you’d usually find me in the woods or in the study with the light off looking out the window, often from a cushion of some sort. I was trying to find a path toward a restful kind of joy that wouldn’t have to be supported by anybody, not even myself who as the journey continued didn’t realize he just wanted someone to lean on who wouldn’t move, a wall to rest against and simply be.

And that’s okay, because even if I am deluded in my thinking, I usually become still enough through the whole process to feel like some part of me is always bending a little in order to allow a bit of light and warmth in, when sometimes the colder and more intellectual parts of me seem to lift me almost like I am being carried from a fire to safety.

I think that’s when the old space boy with his dreams of moving through walls and floating over the crabapple tree out back and listening to neighborly gossip without his having to be there becomes something like a reality check, not for somebody else, but for the me who didn’t know how to be happy without somebody else telling him happiness can only be found in this or that way.

Maybe happiness started to find me the moment I got a library card and took the bus into the city to research careers and college majors at the public library, where I’d spend hours in a chair in the back tucked out of sight rifling through page after page of possible futures like a detective feverishly flipping through cold case files after a big break, that seems as good an origin story as any.

Then again, maybe it had its way with me and just moved on, like a virus or sinus infection, or maybe I’m just not as swollen and ready to explode at the thought someone or something might get in the way of my being happy, having had to live with anger for so long and seen how it changes in time with little to no intervention on my part, you’d think the trying to do anything had already been taken care of, maybe while I was sitting on the bus and looking out the window at trees and city buildings that appeared to be moving by when all that was, for better and worse, was me leaving me behind.