I Thought Happiness Was a Destination

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry fifty

I Thought Happiness Was a Destination

There was a time in my life when if someone asked me what made me happy,

I would have gone silent trying to answer.

Not because nothing did.

But because I thought it had to arrive as certainty.

As achievement.

As permanence.

As something earned.

A title.

A destination.

But this morning, while standing inside the ordinary ritual of my day,

it came to me quietly, innocently, like the seven year-old in me whispering,

hey, it’s this…

The way that I am makes me happy.

How I think, how I see the world.

The way sunlight through trees can suddenly feel holy.

The way the moon can emotionally rearrange you.

It is this.

Writing until language opens.

The sky right before rain.

Music that reaches into the body before the mind understands it.

The moon waiting faithfully above another sleepless night.

Paint on my hands.

The ache of longing that becomes art.

How beauty is seen in the ordinary.

Curiosity.

Wonder.

The almost-unbearable tenderness of being alive at all.

And suddenly I understood something that felt both ancient and embarrassingly simple.

I even giggled aloud…

Happiness was never missing.

I was.

Or perhaps not missing—

only separated from myself beneath years of noise, survival, performance, grief, rushing, becoming.

But somewhere beneath all of that,

the same woman still existed.

The same little girl who looked at the night sky as if it were speaking directly to her.

And what startled me most was realizing I can still feel her.

Not in a childish way.

Not as regression.

Not as longing to return backward.

But as recognition.

I can still stand beneath a wide sky and feel the same wonder I felt as a child.

I can still look at the moon and feel something ancient open inside me.

I can still smell summer air at dusk and remember what it felt like to be young enough to believe the world was alive and speaking.

And maybe that is the revelation.

Not that wonder disappeared—

but that adulthood tried to convince me it was immature to keep it.

Yet here I am, grown now, carrying both wisdom and wonder in the same body.

Still looking upward.

Still listening.

Still moved by beauty in ways I can never fully explain.

She never disappeared.

She waited.

And now, after all these years, I think I am finally becoming someone safe enough for her to return to.

That is the closest thing to happiness I have ever known.

Not finding myself.

Remembering that I was here all along and finally loving the ways that I am.

— With Grace & Ink,

Mai