So Much For Our Happy Endings

Which came first, tragic stories or tragic lives? Does art reflect what we have become or did it create the sad world we now know? It seems we are no longer satisfied with the happy endings of simpler times, but crave darker tales of isolation, abandonment, loss, even death, in order to make us feel—feel something, anything at all. I’m just left wondering whether it is because we forgot to be happy somewhere along the way. Not a day to day happiness, but a joy and contentment in the accomplishment of merely living. Is it this forgetting that caused a need for a powerful enough emotion like misery to replace what used to dwell within, which is just reflected in the stories we tell, or did the need for an expansion of literature drive our paths to mirror new tragic patterns? Whatever the cause, whatever the effect, I have a feeling our world is not as it once was. We are not what we once were. Only ghosts, lost within the shadows of sweet misery—wandering forever as its companion, and calling out to a past road we said goodbye to long ago.