"The tricky thing about happiness is when you're a child who's not so bright, like me, you're stuck with your parent's idea of happiness until you hit a wall. And believe me, hitting that wall isn't such a pleasant experience."
"A nice family in a nice home with a nice job?" The doctor replied as he followed her sit, leaning against a nicely sized mango tree that embraced the breeze around the two of them.
The girl was a lovechild, a desperate attempt at a son by a son of a haciendero with the French belle best friend of his homosexual brother. Her mother, having no legal claim at the estate of her father, fought for her place in the haciendero's son's family. The haciendero's son's legal lover fought for her's and his two older daughter's. She died, first, in grief and resentment. Then, finally, in a consequential accident. Her mother left her father after and went back to her country. She never remarried, but, rather, distracted herself, isolating herself in her work, earning her own estates. Her father did so as well. So much for happiness.
"That is the conventional happiness. Although it comes in so many forms these days." She retorted with a snide laugh.
"A convenient happiness is more like it." He laughed with her.
"Despite our best efforts to deny our limitations and weaknesses, it always manages to manifest in our inevitable need for stability. We don't change as fast as technology. We ease everything in. We mourn." She continued.
"I remember a few months before Adrian died, we were about seventeen or eighteen then, he introduced me to this guy he was dating."
She still remembers his face so clearly as that bright afternoon. His cheekbones, his jawline, every crease, every dimple, every pore was still embedded on her memory. She remembers that summer. She remembers the marble sidewalks and the white stone walls, how the light illuminated everything in that bleached town. It seemed like a summer haze. The heat, the brightness of the place, the strong perplexing emotions caused by their hormones and their adolescent idealism. The sun was as bright and promising then.
"We were in Marabella. The three of us went out. The guy turned out to be such a darling that we're still good friends now. We went out for drinks, to get high and to dance later in the evening. We were there, the three of us, in the middle of a crowd of mostly half naked men. We all just took another round of purple MG's. We were all peaking. The music was like magic and the moment was just perfect. The three of us were just dancing under a luminescent new moon. It didn't matter that I wasn't his girlfriend anymore. He's my most favorite person in the world. He was the only person who's seen me from childhood up to that point."
"I thought we were going to get married. It didn't matter if he slept with guys." The girl smiled again, faintly but something more radiant like a ray of sunshine from an old world on a cloudy day.
The doctor inhaled the last of the remaining ambience looming from the sunset. Then, he smiled too, with her, as if he was there in that particular moment that was.
"But he wasn't ready to live the rest of his life in the closet?" He asked.
"He never came out. He didn't have plans. He just didn't want to be happy living a lie."
"It wouldn't be right to live your happiness at his expense either. He's a noble man."
"Of course, I'm telling you this in full confidence that you will honor confidentiality stipulated by our medical relationship."
The doctor laughed.
"Don't worry, mademoiselle. I may not be as noble as your friend but I deeply honor my profession."
Then, for the first time, she laughed an innocent laugh. Not outlined by contempt or scorn but by pure genuine amusement, perhaps, by his self-depreciation or his mildly comforting character that seems to be exactly what she needed.
"I realized that that was happiness. Even if you took out the chemicals out of our system, it would still be. The chemicals just aided our inhibitions out of our system. So I can see the bigger picture. All that mattered was what I felt."
