A Quote About Happiness

This video clip is an insert from one of my first and favourite animes, Code Geass. Arguments over its masterpiece qualities aside, this little excerpt has stayed with me for a long time. It's about happiness. Happiness. Something seemingly so basic and over-depicted and exploited for commercial gain. But lately this anime metaphor made me think of my friends. They can get so close to you that sometimes you see right past them, like glass. You acknowledge their presence but only as moral support for the things you want to accomplish beyond them. And sometimes, it's only when they turn away from you that you look again and gasp at the brilliance of their beauty, glimmering, reflecting the sunlight. Only then you suddenly realize how precious they were to you. And you want them back, the jewels that illuminated your life. 

I recently had a once-in-a-lifetime video conversation online with a good friend of mine. We talked for almost 2 hours without knowing it, about matters so personal I doubt either of us had shared with another before. It was a heart-to-heart conversation that...people my age nowadays rarely get a chance at having. And after that, I was moved to find the chat history of another dear friend of mine who has grown so distant in such a short time, for many reasons. As I was scrolling down from the very beginning, when I first added that friend on chat, I saw just how quickly our friendship blossomed with one friendly converse after another, and another and on it went, sometimes late in to the night. And as I looked back and pictured those precious moments as we began to learn about each other, became more and more familiar with each other, started swapping jokes and puns, and had rhyming competitions which I always lost at, and traded good songs to listen to as well as bad ones, and shared cheesy lyrics, and helped each other with homework, and teased each other and encouraged each other at times of stress, and created short stories and medieval fantasies and critiqued them, and discussed about the meaning of love and life and the universe and all its being...I couldn't help myself but feel a bit sad. This casual start to a friendship that burst in to magnificence seemed to have faded as quickly as it came. Part of it was because we were both flawed in such different yet similar ways that nature simply pushed us apart. It's not my friend's fault, nor mine. But if one day we both looked back at all the little actions and choices we made along the way, perhaps we'll find the key to bringing back the forgotten dream.