I feel numb. It happens after each moment of intense joy. It’s the gaps, the pauses, and the silences.
What you feel is longing. You long for someone to share these moments with. Someone who would understand and comprehend your joy. Someone who would embrace your joyous moments. That person that is missing transcends all our other relationships. It is the person that makes you smile at the slightest recollection of them. We all have moments of happiness where we can’t stop smiling, or we can’t breathe because we are laughing uncontrollably. We long for someone special to always be there during those moments. But, we also find comfort in being able to return home to them, to share our stories with them. It is that void, excuse the pun, that leaves us feeling hollow. When no such person exists, our doubts surface. We start to wonder if those pleasant moments were all just part of our wild imagination. We start to recount the events; perhaps you heard the joke wrong, perhaps it wasn’t as funny as you thought, perhaps it was just the effects of dessert. We lay there in bed, alone. We want to be held, because we have lost our hearts, and now we fear that we are losing our minds.
But I thought I was happy. Why can’t I just be satisfied with what I have, what I’ve come to terms with, rather than hold on to a fairytale?
You are happy. But, at some point in life, you were happier. So much so, that you wouldn’t have thought to call yourself happy. You just were. That’s how life is supposed to be. Or, so we thought. We got used to waking up with a smile on our face. We got used to that little child that would jump up and down inside of us whenever we saw that person we loved. We got used to them knowing. As if they could see that kid, and they knew that it was our heart. We got used to hiding in their embrace whenever things weren’t going so well. Perchance we got greedy, wanting to always hide in their embrace. It was the reassurance that they were ours. It was no longer a fairytale, because we were actually living it. They, along with the love we had and felt for them, encompassed the world. We were bubbles in their hands. And they popped.
I miss it. I miss them.
So do I, dear. So do I.
LITTLE TALKS 
She wonders too much sometimes, she gets lost in these thoughts, but unintentionally. However, you already know that. These moments of hollowness are abrupt, they come unannounced – they always follow on from any given moment of happiness regardless of their intensity. She’s defenseless against them. She knows how to cope with sadness that comes with a calamity that may befall her; for their arrival has a more methodical pattern of approach. These ‘gap fillers’, the pauses, they silence her. In a way I believe they humble her, maybe they’re teaching her how to become stronger. Maybe these pauses are an inevitable part of her life’s struggle and she needs to learn how to harness their energy.
But, you are correct when you refer to her longing, it’s been so long that she’s forgotten what an embrace feels like. She doesn’t remember the warmth the fills the soul when one is held because for now she is the one that others turn to to be held. She has become the one who holds and comforts. They lean on her, and for a long time that was enough, but we forget that the one we lean on needs someone to lean on too.