We all have a story

We all have a story we don't want to tell.

There is pain in the eyes, but you see me smiling. It might have been the joke you said or it might have been a happy moment for you. You are happy and so was I. I smiled curving my lips, assuring that I am happy. Of course I am happy. Why wouldn't I be happy? You give another hard look into my eyes, trying to leap inside the broken fragments of the soul, but you strike the doubt off the table with convincing smile I give you. I was happy or perhaps I have mastered the craft. 

"What makes one happy?", I sat down contemplating while I turned the pages of the novel that I was reading. I had covered a good fifty pages, only to realize that I was reading but my mind wasn't here. It had been somewhere else, lost. The story on the book continued, the life around continued, but I was still stuck in the limbo, the limbo of the past. And when I look at the page under the bright fluorescent light , I still remember the last scene which happened fifty pages back or was it the memory that never fades. 

I revisit the question when I saw the kid drowned in his game suddenly looks up and starts talking to me with a glow in his eyes. When he said he was a Tiger and I responded back that he wasn't. His response was rebellious yet I saw the carefreeness, a sort of freedom and happiness. After all he was a kid and he put me in a trance of thought, while I was still figuring out the answer to the question "What makes one happy?" Perhaps, I was asking the wrong question. I know what makes one happy. I have been there. May be, the question should have been "Why am I not happy?". I could give you a million reasons or one, and I still wouldn't let you in. Because some pages are better left unturned, some stories are better left untold. Perhaps, happiness is keeping the demons inside and never letting them out.

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ak