The Smell of Sun and Warm Bodies

Why were you cheating on me with Joy? You are supposed to be miserable all the time. You long too much for a past that is gone.

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Here is the digitized text of the typewritten piece, only very lightly edited. To read it as primary text, as it came out of the typewriter, scroll past all of this and read the graphic below. I hope the reading of it gives you Joy.

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I first thought that these essays inside the box would be all anger and not any shred of happiness and so far I have not been proven wrong. But one thing I keep focusing on in my life is not about pain or anger or injustice or loss of purpose or autonomy, though there is plenty of all that to go around — but the absence of JOY! Where did Joy go?

Where did my ability to see and feel good stuff go? Where did it go for all of us? Why is everything now a chore instead of something we have the luck and privilege to do?

I have to do the laundry. I have to write that letter. I have to bang out that essay. I have to create that recording.

I have to produce that podcast. I have to go to work. I have to go to your birthday party. I have to edit that manuscript. I have to... insert any number of things here and everything is a chore. Where did the joy of feeling the outside sun on your face go? Or the feeling of dirt on your hands? The joy of feeling warm water rush across your skin, the smell of clean soap in your hair? The rush of wind across your chest. The feel of your throat tighten as each word escapes onto the page, your eyeballs furtively watching the horror of your thoughts spill onto the page, helpless to stop the carnage. Don’t say THAT, your brain screams to nobody listening. Yet, here it is... naked thoughts with nobody stepping up to defend them. Where is JOY??? Did I not feed you well? Did I not give you enough ammunition to fight these other feelings?

Was I that short-sighted? Have I left you on the battlefield, alone, naked and afraid?

To weekends where cell phones did not exist, where sand and sun and warm bodies and the smell of sunscreen did, where the roads felt smooth and curvy and the wind in my hair and my eyes.

I think about entire Sundays were spent on the beach, sand everywhere during and days afterwards... the smell of skin warmed by the sun, massaged by coconut sunscreen.

No notifications, no phones ringing, no anxiety of the server being down... no blockade to joy, when I owned my time and space, my own thoughts which were always where I was. Always...

YOU ARE HERE. And here we are now, apologizing for feeling any joy, guilty for not spending those extra few minutes grinding out on some pointless software that is exceedingly awesome and under-appreciated for what it is, always missing that one feature that was expected but never expressed. You must suck because I think your thing here sucks... I alone get to determine how much you are worth based on my unexpressed expectations ...

Did you not get my text? Why were you not glued to your phone so that I can pump misery straight into your eyeballs and earholes?

Why were you cheating on me with Joy? You are supposed to be miserable all the time. You long too much for a past that is gone.

But is it?

Does it really need to be? How did all THIS become normal? What if I chose it not to be? How does one even do that today? The phone does not come with an off switch and I have now leaked beyond the box and not found Joy...