Stories

Stories haven't always been sad. The ones you read when you were a kid were never sad, I bet. Or at least they would never have ended sadly.




I remember reading one about a dog. I was six or so. A few pages in the dog went missing and the children who owned the dog were heart broken. It's amazing how few words in giant typeset are required to explain heartbreak to a child. Or perhaps it was the cartoonish images that conveyed it. But whatever. By page ten the dog was home and chewing on a bone in the company of the happiest children in the world and I closed the book smiling. I reread it more times than I can recall because I wanted to go on the same journey over and over.



I wanted to feel sad but only so that I would experience that incredible feeling of happiness at the end. And at the end of the book, nothing is any different than it is at the beginning. The children have their dog. But having lost their dog briefly that "normal" situation of having him again seems so much happier than it did at the beginning.



It's the human condition, I suppose. You have to experience life without something to know what life with it is what really makes you happy. I'm not talking about specific people. I'm talking about situations or feelings.



Like you never really appreciate NOT having a headache until you get one and then get rid of it.... I'm making no sense am I?



What I suppose this post has been a long way around saying is that I never knew I was happiest in a relationship until I lost one that meant something. I'm now the happiest I have ever been and that can largely be attributed to my son, my family and my fiancee.