April 7, 2007
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A moment of perfect happiness – shortstory
They were my friends, the two of them who asked me to journey with them. And they needed my help, so I agreed. They spoke of the joy of adventure, the pleasure of discovery, and the possibility of treasure at the end with such enthusiasm that I felt my enthusiasm growing too. But I was cautious. Such journeys are not without their risks.
We entered the ruins together and slowly we traversed them. There were dangers a plenty, traps and pitfalls and strange powers barring our way. My power was enough to disarm many, my presence could diffuse the risk of others. But for the rest, we helped each other, worked together to keep each other safe. It was harder than we expected even with my ability and several times we feared for our lives, but somehow we managed to make our way through the maze like caverns and find our way to their end.
A grand hall awaits us by there is no treasure to be seen. Only ahead at the back wall of the strange chamber there is a gaping square hole like a shoot just barely wide enough for a grown man to slide through, above it are strange runes and symbols of a bygone era.
My friends approach it eagerly I hold back but they can find nothing interesting about the wall. They wonder if they should try entering the shoot and seeing what is beyond.
“Wait.” I say.
As I said, I was cautious. So I slowly walked up to the front of the room and my friends make way for me. As I come up to the shoot the words above it start to glow reacting to my presence. I am not surprised, these sorts of things tends to happen when you command the power.
A moment passes and then we hear a mysterious disembodied voice and I know that it is stating the words inscribed in the runes. It states:
“For each, ask and receive a treasure of great desire or for one enter and experience a moment of perfect happiness.”
Trepidation strikes me. Something isn’t right. I look to my left and to my right at my companions and then I see it in their eyes. There is guilt overwhelmed by desire. They want it. Badly. They had known of this. This was why they really came, why they brought me to this place and asked for my help. They needed me but they knew that only one of us could claim the prize.
What would have happened next? Would they have begged me? Forced me to choose between one friend and another. Both had used me. Both had betrayed me in this. But even had they not I could never pick one over the other.
Or would we fight for it? Would our friendship shatter here? I could not bare it.
I could ask, but for what? And would we not wonder always what we had missed? I knew it was the safer course to take the consolation prize and be happy and together, but I wondered if the insidiousness of uncertainty would undermine our alliance. Who was I to choose for them? And I could see in their eyes that neither would ever agree to anything less than perfection.
I had one advantage left and only one choice that I could be made. I was closest. So I jumped in before they could react and stop me. If only one could take the risk let it be me. Or was it just that I was just as selfish and filled with greed and I wanted it as much or more than them?
I find myself lying on my back in an idyllic landscape. Above me, I watch beautiful clouds float by, the sky is a perfect blue. I feel the warmth of the sun heating my face while the cool ground cools my back and a gentle wind floats over me. I am younger here. Just a kid again. All the burdens that had plagued me daily of doubt and fear and an underlying anger were all gone as were the memories of hurt and fear and pain. I never knew how heavy a burden they had been for me until they were lifted.
Beside me lying on his back as well is a person that I know instantly to be my closest friend. There are no names in this place, none that can be vocalized but I know his and he knows mine. We lie looking up in companionable silence, lost in our own thoughts but they don’t feel to be separate thoughts. I feel as if we are two sides of the same coin and that all that we do is linked.
After a moment there is a rustle in the trees and we hear soft laughter coming from beyond. We both sit up at the same time and stare off to see our friends emerge from the tree. There are four of them, two girls and two guys and they look at us with their happy smiling familiar faces. I know them all, trust them all, and I know that they are amongst the only people in the world that I would want to spend time with.
“What’s so funny?” my friend asks, with pretend hurt.
They don’t respond directly, but one of the guys says “You two weren’t going to keep this place all to yourselves were you?”
We laugh and talk companionably and soon we have an impromptu picnic in the glade. We eat and talk and play and chatter about pointless things. But never a word causes me discomfort and I never feel at a loss of what to say or never feel a sense of fear of what they might think. It was perfect. Almost.
As its get’s later, I ask the question. I know her name and we all do, the seventh and last member of our group who is absent from our revelry. Someone snickers. A girl tells me that she went to sit by the lake. I twirl a blade of grass in my hand and stare at it as everyone grows quiet around me. My closest friend looks at me with concern. My other friends look at me with curiosity.
I give some pointless excuse that all can see through and stand up and walk off away from our pleasant companionship to find her. Through the trees I travel and to the lake where I see her sitting on a peer that stretches out into the water. The sunset shines behind her.
I walk over and sit beside her, our legs are dangling out over the water. She turns at my presence and smiles at me. I smile back and ask her the obvious question.
“What are you doing out here by yourself.”
She turns away from me still smiling and answers me with a question.
“Have you ever seen a more beautiful sight?”
I cannot deny it. Eventually I turn my eyes from her and stare out to see what she sees. The beauty of a perfect sunset over the twinkling water, a sight alone that seems to make life worth living. We sit in silence staring at the light, she rests her hand lightly upon mine.
This was it, a group of perfect friends, a perfect moment of companionship. No fears, no doubts, only the comfort of knowing your place in the world and experiencing the joy of the perfect beauty that surrounds us. I thought that I was happy truly. Perfectly happy.
As I have this thought, she turns to me suddenly. The light from the sun is more than three quarters gone. Soon it will have faded. In her eyes is a seriousness and a certainty that I had never seen before. She looks me right in the eyes and says the words that haunt me still. There is a deep sadness tinging her voice as she says them
“Not even perfect happiness lasts forever.”
With that her face contorts into a kind of anger and rage I’ve never imagined. She grips me harshly and throws me into the lake leaping in after me. There she hold my head under the water while her eyes glare at me with unfathomable depths of raging hatred. I’ve never seen such fiery despite in the eyes of another. I’ve never felt anyone look upon me as if I was the lowest of the low, worthy of nothing more than total elimination.
I look up through the clear water through which my head is submerged. I look beyond her to the side of the lake and I see them. My four friends standing there and pointing at us in the water. But none make a move to save me. No. Instead, though my ears are filled with water I can hear their laughter floating up toward me. They are shaking with laughter pointing and mocking me. To them my drowning is a joke. I am not worthy to be saved, but I am worthy of giving them a moment’s amusement as I suffer.
I shudder but one thing keeps me sane, and keeps me struggling to force my way up for air and breathe and life. My closest friend is not amongst them. He is not there laughing at me. He wouldn’t I think.
But where is he? I look around desperately while I struggle, always trying to keep my eyes away from seeing the fiery hatred in her eyes or the sparkling laughter of those on the shore. Eventually I look up to the pier from which we had jumped and I see first his shoes at the edge of the pier and I feel a sense of deep relief. He has come all the way out here to save me! Surely he won’t abandon me. I reach out my hand towards him thinking and hoping that he is reaching down to grasp mine. My eyes travel up and up his body as I stretch further and more desperately. Until I finally see him.
He is not reaching toward me. His eyes are clasped firmly in front of him. And his eyes, his terrible eyes. The sight cursed me to a lifetime of nightmares of those eyes. In them there was not laughter nor fierceness only a coldness deeper than the frigid waters beneath a thousand miles of ice. Everything about them screamed out a kind of cold disregard and disgust that I knew was devoted solely ant totally toward me. His eyes spoke condemnation at me. They screamed at me. Though he never said a word I knew exactly what he was saying with those eyes and the message rent my soul. “How could you,” they said, ” How can you be so weak?”
I gasped in the anger and sorrow and fear and embarrassment I felt. And with it, I finally let the water into my lungs and with a moment of perfect despair I collapsed into emptiness.
I awoke screaming at the top of my lungs with tears flying down my face. I struggled fiercely at hands that gripped me my mind fully lost to me for that moment still thinking I was drowning in the water.
It took a long moment before I gained control of myself and I heard my name being spoken over and over again by them who were with me still my two friends who had journeyed here with me who had fought with me to reach this place, to get this so called “treasure”.
I see in their eyes their deep concern for me. I wonder how long they had been there with me holding me, striving to bring me back to sanity. I gasp and choke an tears and I grip their hands tightly as the images of my experiences float back through my mind replaying through the clouds. I see the clouds, the sunset. I see their facing happy and smiling then filled with hatred, and scorn and overwhelming disappointment.
It seemed like I sat there on the stones for an eternity but eventually I got up and they my friends ever present stood with me. I wiped my eyes and found my center. I shook off their grasp and walked slowly on my own around the small room that must have been at the bottom of the shoot where we all now stood. I walked slowly two circuits around the room taking deep breathes the entire time until I knew for certain that I was in complete control of my faculties.
Finally I came back to my friends and I looked at them and it was as if I saw seeing them for the first time.
“Are you ok?” One of them asked with trepidation.
I didn’t answer. But I looked at them closely. They were truly concerned for my well being. I knew that this that had happened to me weighed heavily on them. They felt the guilt for it even not knowing what it was that had happened. But just below the surface I could see it in them too the burning question that next to knowing that I was ok was the one thing they most desired to know, needed to know, would not be satisfied without knowing. It was why they came. It was why we are all here now.
They must have seen it in my eyes. The certainty of the demand that they ask and ask now. I would not volunteer it unless they asked.
“What was it like…” one of them started his eyes turned away unable to face me.
“… that… moment of perfect happiness?” the other finished, her face filled with shame and uncertainty as she tried to look anywhere but into my eyes.
And I thought about it then and I knew the answer. There in that place I had experienced ‘perfect’ friends and ‘perfect’ experiences but they had been unreal, illusions. Those friends would commit no wrongs feel no doubts, fear no evils. But these friends before me know. They felt shame and uncertainty. They had their own wants and needs independent of me that could drive them to great evil or great good. And yet they had a concern for me, had come after me when they heard me screaming alone in the darkness, had tried to save me. Those people in the other world, they had been been the perfect friends. But these friends here in this world. They were real.
I gripped both of their hands in mine fiercely.
“Perfect happiness…” I started.
I waited until they both looked up and met my gaze squarely. Then I spoke with more seriousness and conviction than I had ever spoken before.
“There is no such thing!”
And then I smiled at them, softening my grip but still holding their hands and they smiled back cautiously at me. These were my friends. My real friends. Hopeless real and hopelessly flawed just as I was. I needed them as they are and what they are. I didn’t want perfect happiness. Just a chance to find even a little was good enough for me.
“Let’s go home.”
