I would sell my martyr.

Stomping my worn boots into deep puddles on the way home, I kept Bazan up loud and hummed him into the night while my fingers gripped inside my coat pockets. This is a strange place, it is, and I don't just mean this new town I've had to be living in. I mean this darn world. The whole of it. A kind of world where in this town, with a good person I have known for just some short weeks, I would close my evening with my hands circling his back while he cried against me for the pain of something he had lost and was somehow perpetually losing to other turns that could boast no similar kind of infinity. I had said less words than slow and thoughtful murmurs while I listened to him convince himself of some shuttered composure and then let his feelings loosen and shudder all over again, and alongside this I was thinking that my feelings knew his feelings very well, though as a knowledge and empathy that is kept in a simmer deep down. I told him that it is okay to work towards being okay and to not feel okay whatsoever all at once. The conversation, helped by the length of the walk that takes me to my house from his, made me give over to thinking about the phrase I had been hearing from some other places as well, being told that despite a most important circumstance, that "otherwise I am happy." It is something I do not think I can accept when hearing it, because there is no such thing as a happiness otherwise, a happiness that is excepting one or a few objects. Happiness is always only full. And there is a kind of defiance in such a phrase, so that just saying it gives its hidden truth away, that it is not full. That perhaps it is working so hard to chip off a cornerstone of one's very existence in the world, to knock away some part of them that shapes how they know to breathe. One can of course feel pleasure, perhaps drawn from some other circumstance or gained within one's own self. But pleasure, even deep pleasure, is still far apart from happiness if it is existing despite something else. A person can not call themselves happy if the path they are taking towards that happiness very purposefully leaves someone else in a heap. In this way, then, happiness is a social task. There is no way to feel it if you are disallowing another to feel it. So the objects that compose or oppose one's happiness extend beyond one's own self--it also exists out of the happiness you give to, or keep others from having. So neither can happiness be derived from the hurt of another. Not when one is making that hurt become, keeping it in becoming, not no matter how many turns you take.