The night is cold and the cool crisp air cuts at his chest like tiny daggers. He gasps as the sudden pain takes his breath away. Despite the numbing temperature it's a beautiful night, among the first he has seen in many. The night sky is crystal clear, not a cloud in sight. The stars were incandescent, so alluring that he thought for a minute he must be in a dream. There was no way that something this beautiful could be so real in a world so full of anger and disappointment. It seemed surreal, all the different colors that were embedded into the sky. It was if someone had painted the view he was now trying to take in with big, bold beautiful brush strokes of violets and blues. Despite the hypnagogic atmosphere he found himself in, he had never felt more alive; he had never fully appreciated life until that moment. He wondered why it had taken him so long to witness such a sight. He was just too busy. He lived life like he was stuck in fastforward, always going, always doing, never stopping, never seeing.
And then there he was, alone on some dusty old back road stranded in time. For the first time in the last ten years his life was actually on pause. Bored out of his mind and waiting on the repairman he climbed onto the hood of his car, stretched out, put his hands behind his head, and looked up into the night sky. As inconvienced as he was, he actually enjoyed the time alone. The country was quite, peaceful; time actually seemed to stand still. All that could be heard was well, nothing. Laying there and taking in the scenery around him, he began to relax; the tension in his shoulders started to ease and the wringle on his forward started to slowly disappear. He began to recollect on his life, how he had gotten to where he is now. Up until that moment, he never realized how sad and lonely he really was.

It soothes me, the music that is; it soothes me and puts me in a trance. And for a moment, for three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the world makes sense. I start to see things in a whole new perspective. I feel hope; I feel happiness, and I no longer feel alone. I close my eyes and picture a place. It's nighttime. The sky is clear and the stars shine brighter than usual. A soft blanket of snow covers the ground; it's beautiful. That's where I lay, there in the snow looking up at the night sky; yet, I do not feel the cold that surrounds me. Instead, I feel warmth, happiness, contentment. And then it starts to snow; those big white snowflakes begin to fall and land all around me. It couldn't be more perfect...

And then like magic, you appear there beside me. You squeeze my hand and put your head next to mine. Tears begin to build up. Slowly, and ever so gently, they begin to fall down the sides of my face. I smile and close my eyes. The music stops. My eyes open. And here I am once again, right back where I started.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

~John Keats

I use to think that sadness was a place, a place where I'd go when I was unhappy or upset, a little hole I would dwell in until someone came to pull me out. But I was wrong, sadness is not a place one goes to; it's an emotion that ones feels just as happiness is not a place we get to when we feel at times that our lives are complete, it too is nothing more than a feeling, one of several strong emotions. Without one we cannot have the other. We do not know happiness without sadness just as we would not know sadness without happiness. To me, sadness was something negative and I did not realize the true beauty behind it. Society often views sadness as being malignant or even unnatural. And now I begin asking myself, "Is this really the case?".
No. It's not. We wouldn't be human if we didn't feel, if we didn't have emotions and feel to the extremes on both sides of the spectrum. Throughout our lives we will all experience times where we are swallowed up by grief and feelings of despair only to be spit back out and face the cycle all over again.

Many times when we are unhappy, people feel as though something is wrong in their lives or that something is wrong with them personally (at least this is how I felt). But when you really think about it, this sadness does many things. It allows you to appreciate the pain of others, it makes the happy moments in life that much more joyous, and at times it even helps you to see deep down who you really are. Even though people are always trying to achieve that feeling of happiness, it it during times of pain, not pleasure that people begin to grow and develop into the individuals they really are. Looking at sadness in this aspect, does it not have a beauty of its own? The truth behind sadness is a delicate beauty, just waiting to be discovered.