This Time of Ours

"The boy called for the girl to follow him, and he took her hand. He would protect her; they would make their way through this oppressive castle, fighting off the creatures made of smoke and doubt, escaping to a life of freedom. The boy wanted to protect the girl. He held her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders in a walking embrace, to help her feel supported and close to him amid the impersonal throngs of Manhattan. They turned and made their way toward the Canal St. subway station, and he picked a path through the jostling crowd.

His arm weighed upon her shoulders, felt constrictive around her neck. "You're burdening me with your ridiculous need," she said. Or, she said: "You're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you." In another time, another place, she said: "Stop yanking on my arm; you're hurting me!"

He worked his ruler and his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains, implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys."

--Braid, David Hellman

After years of intensively dissecting what happiness is, and ultimately deciding over the fact that my main goal in life is to achieve it, there are aspects of this life I have yet to factor into that goal. There have been moments in my life when I took for granted moments of genuine happiness for what they were, and looked forward (or back) to better times. Lately, though, I find myself to better identify those moments and have learned to breathe in and take them in as they come.

With a better sense of definition and appreciation over my own happiness, come others where nothing makes any sense at all. I'm talking about moments of desperate longing over things long past; moments of complex anger and sorrow that I have yet to learn to take in and dispose of to make space for better moments.

The other day, I was watching a 2018 movie with my girlfriend called Time Freak. The movie is a rom-com about a boy genius that travels through time to fix his relationship, simple enough. At some point during the movie, the main character tells his wife "I wish I knew how to make you happy."

Now, this is a man with all the time in the world, all the second chances available to anybody ever, and the idea of making another person happy is as perplexing to him as to any other.

I sat there and watched a two dimensional character travel through four dimensions, and sympathized with perhaps the only three-dimensional feelings he evoked in the whole movie.

How does one make another happy? In this world, full of complexities and oddities, one in which is hard enough to find one's own happiness, how does one make a person happy?

Every so often a person comes to our lives and has us moving Earth and heaven to achieve this goal. Hell, I don't think I've ever moved as many fingers for my own sake as I have for another.

Yet it feels it's not enough.

At times it even feels like I could build a time machine and break reality off its hinges, and I still won't be doing enough.

And therein lies the question of it all:

To make another happy is a matter of being enough to do so rather than doing or saying or showing enough.

I could rip my chest wide open, and grant everything else I haven't yet given, and perhaps there won't be enough to fill both voids.

To fill a void with another void, is to fill a hole in the dirt with a black hole.

Even so, I could shine as bright as a million suns with happiness every other day, and it could still not be enough.

To attempt to fill a black hole with a sun, just causes the sun to be swallowed and implode. The universe is a large canvas though, and a quasar paints a luminous and beautiful picture in space.

It's just that, a mere man might not be enough to sustain the force of a quasar.