futile

Low-hanging clouds settle upon hills, white chocolate and ripe raspberry filling.  Frosting on grass.  Soft light coming in through a window.  Cups of warm liquid and feet bundled into thick socks.  Leaves losing chlorophyll.  A good story, the kind worth getting lost in.  Calico skies.  Early sunsets.  Fogged-up glass.  Wheels on a wet street.  Colors made richer in the gloom. 

This morning I woke up and the world was new.  And I would say that I'm happy.  That's what I would say if anyone asked me.  I'd say that I'm happy in the present, here and now, in that way I often find it difficult to be happy.  But that isn't always the point, is it?

Potential.  Growth.  All of these words I find exhausting and self-righteous and braggy, like the kind of people you might too often find at the gym.  Pain, but the kind that refines.  The kind that you feel after you've done anything worth doing.  Peace.  But the real kind.  That peace of God that "passeth all understanding."

These are the things my mind gravitates back to, between sessions of prime-time television and sleep.

And they all make happy sound futile.  Like a pop song after a summer storm.  Like refined sugar after biting into the season's most perfect nectarine.