The Wisp Sings
We paint pictures together, fingers smeared across canvases. Yuffie perches on a stool, watches, and laughs. There's something bitter there, but she loves us all the same. It was her idea, not mine, to have them paint their childhood.
My idea of their childhood, and their idea of their childhood are two separate things.
Marlene pushes herself against my side, searching, her heart full of things more than a nine year old can't handle. I press my lips to her forehead, reassure her, and send her back into the fray.
I mean, how much do you give? How much do you hold back? When do you say life is more than smearing fingers on a canvas? That life is more than a dream?
Life is hard, bitter, spitting against happiness.
Life isn't happiness.
We try to teach them that everything is about happiness, about being accepted, and loved when in reality we just love the things next to us. We accept the things next to us.
I love my little Marlene, and my beautiful Denzel. I love them more than my heart can tell them the truth, that life isn't about finding happiness but about finding contentment; to tell them that out front would break me to pieces.
To tell them they won't swell with joy every day but will find that quiet press of contentment as they watch those they love.
That's what I want to tell Cloud.
He's so focused on being sad that there's no happiness.
That in that lack of happiness there's contentment. It isn't an easy thing to swallow, or accept...but to be content is such a beautiful thing. To look at the dirty dishes and wash them, to find something fixed that you thought was broken, to run your hand through his hair, to push your chest into his back in the deep of night.
No burst of fiery passion, just contentment that there's someone next to you. That you can hold them, and they hold you, and know that it's more than just a touch. To feel a warmth that is nothing other than lying beside the one you love. To know contentment is to only touch fingers in the deep of the night as you sleep.
Not unbridled happiness, but just unbridled contentment. Nothing can be better. Nothing can be worse.
There are moments of excruciating pain. Moments of no understanding. Moments of no clarity. Moments of heartbreak based on lies. Moments of love that is no longer love.
But then there are moments of joy.
There are moments of pure joy.
Marlene in lace, her face framed with curls and ribbons, dancing with Denzel.
I hope she knows, it's a moment of happiness in a world of contentment, a world of sadness, and a world of disappointment.
I squeeze Cloud's hand in mine, feeling his fingers like bitter bones. They're sometimes there, sometimes lost, sometimes broken.
A moment of happiness in a world of contentment.
A/N: The Wisp Sings - Winter Aid