The weight of the world is on my shoulders. How am I to bear it? The weight, the crushing, debilitating weight, dreary with grey and sadness, hangs around my neck like a collar that will not come off. I move through life, unseeing, uncaring, for how can joy exist when I feel such sorrow? I am weary with sadness, crushed by my burden of cold iron, forged by my own two hands, callused and bruised. I am fatigued with tears, for they do not end.

Anger sometimes replaces the deep, dragging depression, but even that emotion is drowned by the roaring torrent of despair.

I descend deeper into my personal darkness, the black enveloping all that I am. There is no hope, no light to illuminate my path.

Something catches the corner of my vision, and I turn to look, my head slow with exhaustion. I look up with tired eyes, exhausted with lethargy. My eyes widen in surprise. A beam of light shines across my face, cutting through my blackness. I throw up my hands to block out the searing rays, shielding it against the searing light. But slowly, I lower them, and I look at her, at this ideal, my highest reverence.

Her brilliance banishes the dark, and illuminates all with incandescent wonder. The nobility of her spirit, her radiating intelligence, are a bonfire in the midst of midnight.

She stands tall, proud, noble and unafraid. Her back is immaculately straight, her chest thrown out, her fists at her hips, her eyes rapturous and defiant. She holds herself with a beautiful arrogance that speaks of confidence, sureness, and a love of herself, of life. It speaks of an unshattering will. She remains unbent by the weight of the world, welcoming life, and rising above it. She is everything I seek, everything that would banish the black, everything good and noble in the world. She is everything I have ever concieved of beauty, everything I have ever thought to be good, to be ideal.

But she is distant. I will have to struggle to reach her. She is already passing from my sight; the blackness again threatens. But now I can ignore it, for I know there is a reason to fight the blackness, a reason to press it back. I must reach her, for she is my salvation. Through sheer force of will, I will pull myself from the ashes of sadness, and cast off the monumental weight draped across my shoulders, for it is my right and calling to pursue her.

I know her name, now.

Happiness.