Once Upon Happiness

She asked me if I’m ever happy.

And I laughed.

Not the loud crackling one you feel your gut losing to,

but the kind that rips out of you like a cracked rib

breaking skin,

a sound too jagged to belong to joy.

Happiness is a privilege,

a fortress with high walls

and armed henchmen for gatekeepers

who know my face by heart

only to remind me

I don’t belong there.

It is a bathtub I drowned in

before I ever learned how to swim,

my lungs still leaking silence decades later,

silence that smells of mildew and childhood.

It is the swing that snapped mid-air,

my body plummeting into gravity’s lesson

that falling is the only inheritance

passed down without paperwork.

It is the father’s shadow

that stretched across walls, ceilings, doorways,

until I mistook fear for furniture.

It is the mother’s silence,

not the kind that soothes,

but the kind that suffocates

a pillow pressed against my face

with the weight of tradition and shame.

It is a lover’s kiss

that came chained in debts I never owed,

each moan itemized,

each touch billed in arrears.

People point at my words and whisper,

"that's poetry".

They are wrong.

This is pathology.

These are scans of gangrene,

X-rays of fractures never set right,

the medical records of a body

stitched together with sarcasm and caffeine.

Happiness is not missing;

it is extinct.

A species we hunted for sport,

slaughtered in temples of ambition,

buried under inheritance,

and served as appetizers at polite dinners

where everyone smiles with ornamental teeth and pickled tongues.

I don’t chase happiness.

Not anymore. 

I don't seek it either. 

I autopsy it

or how anatomy remembers it.

I slit its belly open,

catalogue the organs,

pin the carcass to my pages

like an exhibit under bad lighting,

so the world remembers

that once, long ago,

such a creature existed.

When she asked me if I’m ever happy

I wish I could tell her, 

I am the museum of everything happiness destroyed,

its graveyard and its proof.

And every word I write

is the blood still dripping

from its teeth.

But then, a laugh was far more affordable

for her vanity and my vulnerability.