If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of couples arguing, right over there, in that little car...frail translucent girl with red eyes like a lab rat, sniffling, "no, that's not what I'm saying--you said..." and they're sitting at the stop sign for five minutes and the bees are buzzing around the garden across the street with all the poppies and tiger lilies, a radio trails off in the wind somewhere, a thin cloud veils the sun for a moment.
In a Thai restaurant, two men stab at each other with desperate insults, long after the plates have been cleared and the check is on the table with two untouched peppermints, "well I worked my ass off all day while you were lounging at home with your stupid headache!" and you can just tell how much they hate themselves so they're perfect for each other. The peppermints are still there after they leave, heading home to fuck and make up and awaken to breath soured from forgetting how to love.
A walk down a sunny-on-both-sides street meets faces of guilt and deep despair--women who hate women for knowing themselves, men who hate men who love men, people of omnisexual orientation devoid of expression and smoldering like wet leaves, a smoky swamp in their eyes that swallows any reflection of a smile.
And writers have carved these sadnesses into legends and made money for wine off of the decrepit and the deranged as pathetic muses but who has graced the disillusioned with words of love? Who has shown a stellar example of how to treat the ones we love--our parents? Uncles who fingered their nieces at family barbecues and drunken fathers screaming at their sons "you stupid faggot!" and hopelessly dependent mothers devising manipulative schemes to get their kids to do things instead of just plain telling the truth--the truth that we are all frightened little children sometimes and we are all guilty as hell about something that happened too long ago to be worth the brain space and that we all just want to be happy.
Don't you think that maybe if everyone just admitted that deep inside, they hunger for a joyful existence, all else would burn away to reveal what is real?
Could it be that easy to be happy?