Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too

by Jomny Sun

But I am trying to tell myself more that happiness has to be temporary for it to exist. If it lasted forever, we wouldn’t know to call it anything.

CRIES

And when they visit, I try to sit with them, and understand the different nuances between these visitors, to take stock of them and note how each of them makes me feel. It helps me realize that they are not all the same—that sadness is not just one consistently gray, same-feeling blob—but that there are dif-ferent kinds of sadnesses, some more common, some more rare. And when they visit, I have started to find some form of small excitement in the fact that these are the only chances I get to feel them and to observe their details firsthand. It becomes a form of birdwatching, in a way

I believe that the things you notice—that you love, that make you pause—make up who you are. And so it feels, in a way, like those things are a part of you, even though they are outside of you. Which makes me wonder if it would be more accurate to say, perhaps, that a piece of you is kept alive by a part of them. I wonder how many other people think about this tree, or remember it when they think about this street, or this neigh-borhood, or this city. I wonder how many other people stood among its low branches and giant flowers in the spring and felt surrounded by it and thought for just a moment, Nothing else matters. I am surrounded by flowers blooming on the branches of a tree in the spring and I am in the sun and everything will be fine.