I shared an unfinished personal project with my writing group tonight. Genie said parts of it were depressing, but in a way he could relate to, and other parts were so depressing he wondered if things could actually be that way in real life. Then he teased me about never writing happy endings.

At first I protested, but when I looked through the pieces I've shared with the group, I noticed he was kind of right. I don't have "happy endings" in the sense most people would think of. They're usually either neutral or sad/bad/confusing.

This was the happiest ending I could find in my writings. It's a twenty minute writing exercise we did in August-- the prompt was to write something based on "Am I crazy? I must be crazy."

---

The smile so wide it hurt. The feeling in his chest, like water being held back by a dam. The tears of laughter blurring his vision.

Am I crazy? I must be crazy.

His teeth felt dry from the extended exposure to the air. He wasn't sure if he could even push his lips back down over them. A closed-mouth smile would require more willpower than he had to spare.

Happiness. That elusive feeling. That ultimate goal. That primary motivator. Or so they said, at least. Was this it? Had fortune finally decided to favor him? He was afraid to embrace the feeling, lest the universe decide it had mistakenly allotted some luck to the wrong person.

Don't fight it.

It was okay to smile. Okay to laugh. Hadn't he wanted to for so long? Hadn't he wondered how it would feel? And here it was, and he was feeling it, and the feeling was good.

Freedom. It could have been this way so much sooner, if only he hadn't held back. He looked at the people moving toward him, saw the looks on their faces. It didn't matter what they thought of him now. He was done being afraid, being self-conscious, being ashamed and unhappy. This was it.

He was liberated, he was unstoppable, he was going faster than he'd ever gone before. The world flew by as a flash of vivid colors.

He hit the pavement with a heavy thud.

The way I envisioned this is that he flew out of a windshield in a horrible car crash. Or he jumped off a tall building. I'm not sure if either of those is right, but there's nothing wrong with not having happy endings. Movies with endings that vary from the "norm" somehow seem to make better stories. Usually, at least.
» LostSoul13 on 2014-10-11 11:25:52

Sad endings tend to be given the credit of being more "real". But I feel that concentrating too heavily only on the tragic realities makes you forget that there are also fairy tale endings that exist as well.

Both of them are undeniable realities. I think there is a calm sense of beauty in suicide. But I also feel that life takes more courage than death. Great post.
» Randomrhetoric on 2014-10-11 03:04:32

i was drinking something and half-choked on the last sentence. for some reason i found it funny.
» thaitanic on 2014-10-11 11:43:47

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