Defining Happiness

Only recently I thought about this question.  I was prompted as I had pieced together my writings.  The question kept lingering about as I filled in the surrounding history linking my stories together to create my book.  There were many times I reflected on the past.  It became a struggle and resulted in emanating self-confrontation; I remembered my reaction.  I shoved back my keyboard draw as my elbows hit the desk.  I became sickened by an irritable pain.  I had given up writing and rested my head into the worn palms of my hands.  The past played out in my mind in such a cruel way.  The thoughts of where I had once existed as a person versus where I stand today.  My emotions grew wildly like a white rain lily after a morning storm.  This is not so different then to discover an old family photo album at the least expected time.  The album thick, smothered by a layer of aged dust not easily to be cleaned.  With thumbs curled around the album's cover as to open; the cover a dark brown rippled like gator skin and scattered with various indents.  The album had been compressed over the years lived by weighted material possessions acquired, which kept it hidden tightly away.  The pages thick with plastic mastic pocket pages were filled with family photos.  Upon opening the album became an intimate personal release an abrupt personal realization.  The experience provoked past emotions, alike to mine.  In every story I wrote was just like falling back into the moment of each photo.  Speaking a truth as seen by photos neatly tucked behind the plastic sheets lives our real emotions.  The emotions of feeling in a previous time all captured in images.  The images are pictures that ultimately led to defining happiness.  I wished I’d known this before trading in my shove for a backhoe, digging within my writings to finding happiness was always there.  Instead, it took a family photo album opened in hand while settled beside an almost empty box of generic, unsoothing upon use, a box of 1ply tissues.