Small Joys

by Elvin James Mensah

I often felt as if I was contorting myself into all these impossible positions for the sake of making sense to people.

But familial heartbreak really was different, I’d realized. It was nothing like I imagined the romantic kind was, where it was the vulnerability that did you in, that made you susceptible to emotional terrorism. You didn’t have to be vulnerable for familial pain to ruin you; its power to do so transcended walls you’d built, or the emotional distance you’d put forth because you’d begun to

suspect that sometimes love wasn’t all that unconditional.

clasped my final Coke of the night and watched him move through his tailored world, in which happiness was actually happiness and not simply an absence of sadness.

Perhaps my anxieties and trepidations could be as protective as they were destructive. Perhaps they kept me from certain places and from certain things because I was simply not meant to experience them.

I’d started to wonder how important it was to make sense to yourself, if there was any merit in it, since I imagined the only reason you would want to understand yourself was so other people could understand you.

Failures were so insubstantial, so repairable, so easy to amend toward a triumph, yet they still harnessed the power to render my life unbearable.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why I found this concept of self-worth so difficult; I almost felt compelled to ask him, how could I know if I actually deserved better? And was it really up to me to decide?

“Well, there’s having the power of belief,” I’d said, “and there’s whatever my dad has, where he wants to believe that his view of the world is so true, so badly, that he’ll willingly deceive himself.

There was a special satisfaction in knowing that the acquisition of companionship, of finding someone who cared so much about you that they’d not only share in your miseries, but their very presence could be the catalyst for moments of intense happiness, hadn’t disappointed me.

I’d expected that truly mattering to someone would be wonderful, and it was.

He was tired of there being something shameful or unsettling about the blunt expression of friendship, of the simple desire to be there for someone needing to be mocked before it could be respected, of the fact that caring about a friend and wanting the best for them didn’t hold the same value as money, when it was just as essential, if not more so.

Friendship didn’t insulate you from affliction, but it did make the path to some sort of recovery feel worthwhile and almost pleasant, it allowed you to experience the most wonderful things, even in the dark.