Because.

I've spent the better portion of the evening crying. There. I said it. I've been crying. I've been sad.

Hear that, Universe? I'm acknowledging The Sadness. And raising an angry middle finger.

I am in existential umbrage. I am chugging on the moonshine of the eternally angry. I am kicking the shins of the well-meaning but severely misplaced it'll-be-okays. I am dousing all Hallmarkian notions of happy days, happy times, and happy happies with the gasoline of the runaway car that died in mid police car chase because of an overheated engine, and lighting a match. (Yeah, just a plain match. I don't have to effusively describe every damn thing, do I?)

I am...Sad. Scared. Brokenhearted. Pretending. Tired. Hungry. Numb. Sleepy. Awake. Panicking. Catatonic. Ambivalent. Paranoid. Desperate. Apathetic. Sober. Drunk. Bleeding. Spent. Stricken. Condemned. Judged. Consoled. Pacified. Controlled. Feared. Loved. Misunderstood. Unraveled. Ensconced. Exposed. Hidden.

But...and this is me desperately clinging on to that solitary hope...I'll be okay. I'll be okay. I'll be okay. I'll bounce back. I always do. It's what I do.

Because.

...

    ...

        ...

A crimson hot-air balloon will fly in the sky, and my hope shall come back. And by then, I shall have been okay.

(It's just that...right now, at this precise moment, it is very difficult to be happy. And so many people need me to be happy so that they can be happy but...I can't. Please don't ask me to pretend right now. Not right now. Just for a while.)

But it'll come back. And I'll be waiting.

---

It's only for a little while. 

I'm so sorry that I have to go. But it's only for a little while. 

I'll never be too far away anyway.