SADNESS IS A BITCH

Sadness is a bitch. No matter what you try do to keep it out, it finds its way in. You could be making a nice cup of tea and suddenly it’s there, sitting on you like a hat, pulling your body to the floor. You can set traps for where you think it will be next but it’ll do no good. Sadness has no need for patterns and less care for reason. You don’t catch it, it catches you.

Like so many, sadness was Sylvia’s nemesis. She tried covering her scent with various distractions – yoga, chai latte’s with the girls, her favorite magazines, an Asian cookery course – but the sadness kept finding her. It knew where to look. And when it did it liked to toy with her the way a cat might toy with a mouse.
In response Sylvia upped her game. She got a better job. She went to a beach spa in Bali. She cut her hair short. She bungeed a waterfall. She lost 10 kilograms. And then one day while sipping on a particularly strong cosmo she found sadness there beside her on the couch and suddenly everything seemed rather, well, worthless again.

What else could she do?

Sylvia upped her game. She bought five new dresses and an espresso machine. She got an even better car. She plucked the offending parts of her eyebrows. She became an avid runner. She smoked weed for the first time and threw up in her handbag. And then one day while putting on her lipstick before catching up with the work ladies for a dora, there was sadness, propped on her dressing table licking each of its fingers deliciously.
And Sylvia, completely out of character, leaned over, picked up the talcum powder and dabbed sadness on the nose.
“Here’s to you good looking,” she smiled before wrapping it in an embrace. “What I can’t beat, I’ll join.”

What else could she do?

Suddenly sadness didn’t want to be there anymore. It wanted to be somewhere else, particularly in the place where people didn’t want it to be. But it was trapped in Sylvia’s embrace, it’s face in her bosom and it’s skin smelling like talc. There was no fight, just the dull ache of its presence, a little bit grey, a little bit overcast. And in sadness they remained until the day it decided to take its leave and Sylvia went back to driving her car, and running, and singing early Elton John in a turbulent off key.
She wasn’t worried; she knew sadness would be back. Life will tell you it’s a bitch like that and, after all - what else could she do?