I Never Loved Nobody Fully, Always One Foot on the Ground, and by Protecting my Heart Truly, I Got Lost in the Sounds

What is the secret to a happy life? That is the question that underlies every word I've ever written, and maybe every word ever written by anyone.

Despite having written quite a bit, I am not close to answering this question in anything more than a glib way. Most people seem to agree that love is the secret to a happy life, particularly romantic love, the recognition of the soul's counterpoint in another. The problem is that the process of finding and engaging in romantic love contains immense possibilities for unhappiness.

Take Goose and me for instance (you knew the preamble was just a lead-up to another opportunity to natter on about Goose). Logic insists that I abandon him. I ought to de-friend him on Facebook, delete all photos of him, and pretend I never even met him. That way, he'll never have the chance to break my heart. Complete, unbounded romantic whimsy dictates that I persist in my attachment to him in the hopes that at some point in the undefined future, we'll be together. The logical route protects my heart by providing a very narrow floor and ceiling in which I can live. I'll never be more than a certain amount of hurt, but I'll never experience more than a certain amount of happiness. The romantic whimsy route lays my heart bare.

Life is full of unpredictability and possibility. My mom told me recently, with respect to my landlord's trying to keep parts of my security deposit to which I maintain he is not entitled, that it doesn't pay to worry about things in advance because something will always come up that I couldn't have predicted. If that can happen with bad things like having someone steal money from me, then it stands to reason that it could also happen with good things. I keep looking at this photo of Goose and me that I took by holding the camera at arm's length on the train arriving at Machu Picchu. I'm wearing sunglasses and smiling, with the light spilling over my face. The expression on Goose's face is inscrutable. He's smiling, but there's something in his eyes that, depending on how I look at it, could be almost any emotion. Lately, when I've looked at it, I think he looks like someone who is about to have something taken away from him that he wants very much. It is that expression, or that interpretation of that expression, that makes me believe that life, in one of its infinite and unpredictable possibilities, will bring us back together.