Un-happiness
To be happy, however you go about it. There's no other way to live one's life, surely, but to apply ourselves to happiness, in whatever form you think it takes, in whatever way you think it's achieved. No joy like smiling, and living the circumstances in which that smile is generated -- surely.
This is what I thought, until last night, watching the rows of beautiful whores on the pavement, their smiles arched like ten-megawatt hooks, snagging on my vision as we inched through Geylang. Movement blurred those bared teeth and crinkled eyes into a motley of flesh and disquiet, like someone had tried to mirror happiness with a cracked glass. Either they were happy in their lives of bartering their flesh as commodity, I thought, or they weren't. And either way, it saddened me -- inexplicably, to tears.
Cos, you know, I'm like, so melancholic sometimes.
The image of those girls stayed in my head. Not as a remembered image, but a constructed one, where face after smiling face passed by behind my unmoving reflection in the window, As though I saw, in their expressions, something of my own unchanging sadness, deeper, and shadowed with something more than just the darkness of night.