Since Happy Don’t Bear Love

Adedolapo Olisa
4 min readMar 11, 2024

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A tale about a man who found puppy like affection but thumbed his nose down at it.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

This isn’t a take

It really isn’t prose at all

It’s just a NOT journal entry.

It’s a fascination that borders obsession

With the great topic of all

Love.

Yes, the 4 letter word.

There is no excuse for this write up.

Just a brazen attempt at stopping the reactions and claps on “Dear Ex Fiance.”

I wanna top that or give people a new reason to feel.

I don’t wanna have to keep going back to read that sappy piece just because I don’t understand why so many people are moved by it.

So here goes another conundrum.

If someone told me what do you want your home to be filled with ?

I’d say, love running around in little toes and tiny naked little boys wrestling on the couch after eating my pocket dry for the third time in one week.

I can see it so vividly, almost taste it.

I see mixed kids, beautiful and short.

When I say short, I mean they are too little to be tall.

I see a troublesome son slap his sister out of annoyance but not the slap that intends to hurt the other.

The slap that says, stop that! Or I don’t Like that that. Or I don’t Wanna play! Or let’s play, or slap me back!

I see small sister running to hug in between my legs with fully soaked eyes.

“Daddy, Bismillahi slapped me!”

I look into her soul through her eyes and realize how much she loves her brother, and how much she just wants daddy to stop his life and give her some attention.

Any chance she gets to be whisked up into the air and spin for dad to catch her. She’ll take it.

Unfortunately tears are the number one halt to all dad’s activities.

Isn’t it strange? In my mind, I am picturing a very happy home. Yet it’s full of tears and slaps and deceit.

Here is one more thing it’s full Of.

It’s full of happy people in different moods.

Happy.

I don’t know what love is but I know that love is the sperm and the egg and the womb that labors daily to birth happy people. It is the happiness that doesn’t drain no matter the mood swings of life.

It’s the rigid certainty that life’s axe can return like a pendulum, it will return empty handed. Though full of flesh and pain and loss; it will return empty handed without robbing love of the one thing that defines its Instagram reel — happy.

So why is it that the woman that I picture this home with is not a woman that I picture living with ?

Every movie.

Every tale.

Every imagination.

Of what makes love desirable originates and gets glued together by the sheer emotion or mood of happiness.

But is it?

Is it happiness that makes love?

I lied to you, didn’t I?

You read it up like we do Hollywood tales and depictions.

We are fed emotional opium.

So we can be addicted to the books, the screen, the movies, anything that paints a green grass where we don’t live.

Isn’t it all that these are?

An insatiable longing that is well groomed like a real estate ready to be rented.

The house is rarely as happy as when it’s put on sale. The rest of the time, it’s stuffed like an empanada ready to reveal its meat.

Should one buy the house on the promise of presentation ? Or do we buy the house and pay a heavy price just to keep it looking happy!

For what could be worse?

The reminder that the grass is indeed not green or the reality that happy doesn’t define living.

God:

Is it too much to ask? That I be struck down by a thunderstorm in the eyes of my beloved.

I don’t know if that is happy or sad. If she beats me daily or I starve. I don’t know if I desire love that has no health or maybe love that will be my demise.

This I know:

That I maybe smitten, and never recover my senses till I become manure.

P.S: if you get to the end, reply to this post and let me know if the title was fitting. I also considered:

A hopeless Romantic’s Anthem

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Adedolapo Olisa

I’m an aspiring story teller that is learning to let stories tell their own morals. You’ll find me where Faith-Tech-Art meet.