Unhappiness

[sadoeuphemist]

My first impulse would be to say that I was "violently unhappy"
always that particular phrasing,
"violently,"
as if I can only understand unhappiness through demonstration
as if, when left untreated, unhappiness lashes out,
resorts to violence, makes itself visible 
in form of lash and tear and welt,
as if it forces its way out through the skin 
as if we had moved past the usefulness of advice and frank discussion
as if I had to be restrained somehow,
placated, 
pacified 
through urgent intervention,
made unable to hurt myself or others
before any further progress could begin

You'll note the subtext here
"as if," 
meaning that I was lying
not just about the nature of unhappiness, mind you,
but the idea that I was ever unhappy to begin with 

If I had been unhappy 
instead of just malingering
surely I would have been able to identify, however vaguely,
the source of my unhappiness,
surely I would have had some conception of something lacking -
this absent happiness, what it might look like,
and how I might achieve it - 
instead of just these fantasies of violence,
of wanting to be unhappy,
to be helplessly, uncontrollably, congenitally unhappy,
just to have some irrefutable evidence of my distress

If I had been unhappy
surely I would have wanted something better for myself than that