The Helplessness of Happiness

So then, you're a happy person, aren't you?
You strike me as terribly, terribly happy.
I don't like thinking about it.
Happy people are such helpless creatures.
Living in happiness, a person eventually becomes inert and hollow.

I wish you had some incompleteness, some unfulfilled longing, some restlessness, some unhappiness.
I wish some deep melancholy would wrap itself around you.
Without these things, a person isn't quite a person.
Anyone without sorrow in them—I find them repulsive to look at.

Unhappy people feel so intimate to me.
But you feel so distant.
I like seeing you unhappy. And yet, even this small unhappiness of yours gives me a headache!
I want to see you the way I imagine you should be, and yet once you become the way I imagine, I no longer like it.
There is only one you I can bear, and only one you I cannot bear.
What do I even want? I don't know myself! Damn it all! I can't stand living like this!

I have thousands upon thousands of small, fragmented sorrows. You don't have sorrows like that, but those one or two sorrows you do have—in magnitude, they are far, far greater than all my sorrows combined.

Yet still, you're better off; better to carry one great sorrow than countless small ones. A great sorrow passes in time, but the small sorrows—a person must carry those all their life. A great sorrow can truly be healed, but if you try to rid yourself of a small sorrow, half a dozen more come creeping in from nowhere!

I wish your happiness held some sorrow in it, and your sorrow held some happiness in it.