HAPPINESS IS A LOCKED BOX
Sometimes, she can think of a hundred things that make her smile.
She sits at the small desk in her bedroom, pulls out the blue glitter gel pen from her backpack, and locates the writing prompt her English teacher gave her the first day of class under a dated issue of Seventeen.
Her teacher wants to know what happiness is. She's not sure she can answer that in five paragraphs. 'How did you spend your summer vacation?' is the alternative topic. She would have to lie. It doesn't matter -- the poet in her kind of has something to say about being happy.
Without very much thought she scrawls: Happiness is living in a house. She's thinking -- of course -- about a house being a Home.
Her sister turns off the light in the hallway. In the darkness her house feels empty. She lifts the pen to her mouth as she remembers: the couch Buffy doesn't like to sit on; lying gagged on the cold basement floor; Tara's body in the master bedroom.
She frowns a little and flips to a clean page in her notebook. She thinks about Janice's hot new boyfriend and decides that maybe Happiness is being with the person you love. She remembers Willow saying once that being with Tara made her feel beautiful. Then Tara died and the best part of Willow went with her. She remembers asking her sister about love--
Were you ever happy when you were...y'know, with him?
Sometimes.
Like when?
When my eyes were closed --
but that only makes her think about Spike and how love destroyed him.
She decides love is too much like loneliness.
She sighs and then a different thought hits her: Happiness is friendship -- having friends who would die for you, who cannot live without you, who would... Pull you out of Heaven just so they wouldn't have to?
Outside her window she sees a streetlight flicker, then fade into nothing.
She decides Happiness must be a locked box -- a piece of one's self that can't be shared or explained. Maybe Happiness is just being. Perhaps Happiness is just a figment of the imagination -- perhaps, then, pain would be, too.
The poet in her has a headache.
She picks up her pen and begins writing: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, by Dawn Summers.