My Writing

A Man Who Found a Cave Full of Happiness

     When he was a small boy, John found something most spend their whole life looking for. Happiness. Thinking back now, it was suprisingly easy to remember finding it. He had been very young, in the first grade for sure. Possibly playing pirates by himself or some such nonsense when he stumbled into the cave. The aroma is what really drew him deep into the cave. He swore he could smell his mothers Sunday morning waffles in the distance, but it was Thursday. A glorious white light embraced him when he finally perceived pure happiness. It was all over the place, just a mile into the cave. Great big mounds of chromatic cloud jutting out of every which place. He decided to touch it, though even the strongest will would not have been able to resist. Grabbing a great handful, he found it lighter than air. Bringing it closer to his face, he couldn’t help but breath it all in through his nose. Suddenly, an incredibly wondrous feeling arose in his chest. It didn’t stop there; it filled his entire body until he could have swore he was a foot off the ground. The thought of staying here forever was very real in his mind. In the end he didn’t though, he forced himself away from the feathery feast of fun and trudged home thinking of his mother. She would be worried sick if he were gone too long.
     This happened almost everyday of his childhood life. He would come straight to the cave after school and leave it when he finally started to think of his mother. In high school, he felt it necessary to carry a few vials full of happiness with him always. They came in handy whenever Beth, his crush, turned him down for a date or when a teacher reamed him about his failing grades. The weekends were his and his alone. He would spend all day and all night sometimes in the cave of happiness. When he was there, there was no want and no desire in him at all. He never got hungry and he didn’t have to go to the bathroom either!
     Shortly after John dropped out of high school, his mother passed away of heart disease. John felt the worst sadness in his life come over him. He retreated to the cave for almost a month straight. The cave uplifted his body but did little to comfort his heart. He was lonely, so very lonely now. The middle of the summer now, he ventured out to do something he had never done. Bring someone to the cave. It took him all day, searching cafes and the mall and the library, but he finally found Beth at the park, sitting under a tree, her nose in some very large book. All it took was one of his vials to convince her to come with him to the cave. Every day that summer, she visited him in his happy home. At first they tried talking a lot, joking and sometimes frolicking about the cave but eventually they would just lie in each other’s arms and inhale all the cave had to offer. He had never been this happy before, even in this cave of wonders; her presence somehow amplified the joy the clouds filled him with at least one thousand fold.
     On her last visit, John’s heart was forever destroyed. She came to say goodbye to John, because she was going on to college to start her life. She begged John to come with her, to leave the cave so they could find genuine happiness together. But the cave’s happiness was all he knew of and he adamantly declined. She would be back. If he couldn’t resist the cave’s wealth, than she couldn’t either. But she did. She left that day in tears. The next day he was ready to welcome her back. But she didn’t come back. After a week of waiting, he finally realized she wasn’t coming back until after college. So, four long years he waited in the cave, bored, lonely, but happy. She never came, so he waited even longer, never venturing out of the cave for fear he might become not happy.
     Suddenly John became an old man, taking in all the happiness he could every morning and laying about the clouds in the cave, sometimes coughing because of the cold creeping in. Then, on his deathbed, looking back at his life... a tragic sadness came over him. A sadness even the cave couldn’t cure. He had nothing to look back on, no real memories at all... except one that forever burned his heart. Beth’s departure from him. His body now paralyzed, his face wet with tears, he stares toward the entrance of the cave, begging fate to show him her face once last time.

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