Story:How We Live in Joy

Were it not for the calendar, I would forget it was winter. It is a thought I once had every year living in the Minerian Bay. It was impossible to have it here. As I walked through the winding streets of the outer city, tearful sobbing sniffled through the air. Having caught my attention, I would not allow it to be ignored. Years ago, I would not have done it. Yet the cries had to have come from someone, and they came for a reason, and what story would there be if no one stood to observe it?

An gray old man sat on his knees, pulling grass out of the snow-covered dirt. It must've been his garden. "My putterflums! My putterflums~!" And on and on he wept. Fingers bitten with frost, he pulled the gentle yellow-pink flowers out with the roots, sobbing harder with every stem he uprooted. "They're ruined!"

The petals fluttered in the wind. Refitting my mask as it had begun to slip down my nose, I approached the man. "I am sorry for your loss," I said solemnly behind him, as if a death had occured. It certainly did for him. "How could it do this to me?", he continued to cry as a small child. "My beautiful garden, all gone. All because of the winter."

Winter, of course, came every year. As he cried into his hands, his tremendous white nose poked through his fingers. I noticed the blue tear he had drawn on his mask, likely the day before, in anticipation. He was surely preparing hours for this. "Let it all out. Such a loss is never easy.", I hugged him, letting him into my embrace. He wept on my shoulder. We stood there for a moment.

"Why must the world be so cruel? I have tended to them all year. One day of snow and they are all gone.", his tired voice softly whimpered. He took his mask off for a brief second, wiping the tears underneath it. His nose was far smaller than I expected. Perhaps he just sees it differently. "Such is life.", I spoke to him. "A thing, no matter how beautiful, will meet its end one day."

"What must I do then?", he sniffled. "What can I do when all of my work has been destroyed? I have nothing anymore... If I die tomorrow, I will have nothing to me..." Barely holding back tears, he once more moved onto my shoulder, flooding my coat with tears. "You start again. Every time the snow ravages your garden, you start again. Beauty is not eternal, but creating it remains most important. You will make the world better with your garden blooming again next year."

Tears still in his eyes, he placed his hands on my cheek, and smiled. "Thank you. Thank you." And thus he gained his push, the push to advance and develop his own character. A man on the brink of suicidality over the loss of a few flowers, now experienced a change in his soul. It was performance. But it was real. Such is life in Joy.

I try and keep myself good and uplifting, for such I was raised in my childhood in La Rossa. Such a past I cannot fully shed, nor am I expected to. I am simply expected to accept it. Though I once considered it fair, my skin is shades darker than that of a born Joyan. I show it off proudly. Just as the old man shared his tears with me without reservation. For that is what it means to live in Joy.

Men still in La Rossa cannot fully understand life in the north, on these queer Isles. They cannot even begin to comprehend it. They find the people of this place crazy, mad, a landmass of nut-cases that one finds pleasure thinking about only in context of joke and ridicule. Yet in my four years of stay I have come to accept this previously foreign way of life, and I have come to experience liberty that we only spoke of in the Republic.

To live truthfully, being unafraid of showing what one believes in his heart, is not something that exists elsewhere. It is a value one may preach in a democracy (or elsewhere even, where beliefs are so ingrained they are not questioned, and thus everyone speaks what they believe), but it is not a value that may be reached with the prudish sense of shame we all hold. In the archipelago, the roles we hold had been made for us, often long before we or anyone else alive existed. In Joy, the role one takes is entirely their own.

Laughter, crying, anger, fear, do not happen without reason. Academics in La Rossa speak of their need for our sociality, as signals to others of what we are like, how we feels. But such a framing forgets the impact such emotions have on us. Our emotions push our characters in certain ways. Each experience develops them further. Why keep them hidden?

Looking back on when I worked in an accounting office back in La Rossa, there was no greater moment of repression than when the firm director entered the room. As we all went quiet, we were silently expected to respect his authority, whatever our own opinion was of him. We did it because was polite, and no one wished to make a scene.

Last week, my coworker Boulardo, having gotten fed up with our boss, chose to stand up to him, yell at him in monologue, honked his nose and jumped out of the building window (he survived, thankfully). Such a scene, so bizarrely comical that it only reminded me of something I'd have seen on the radiovision, stuck in my mind as an example of true freedom, that to act impulsively and truthfully, whichever way one's heart sways him.

The old man perhaps exaggerated, he practiced, he prepared, but he did not fake his emotions. He felt every last tear that dripped down his cheek. Such passion cannot be formed artificially. It is merely preparation before a performance. The world is a stage, and to be human is to perform. This is what it means living in Joy.