The City Without Joy

A Story by Miro

Very short story about a person in search of joy

Just over the mountains, close as the crow flies, but an almost impossible journey by foot, is a city where no one feels joy. They live their lives in quiet discomfort, unaware of the thing that is missing from their experience. How do you look for something you have never seen? Can you know a feeling if you haven’t felt it before?

One of the joyless attempted the journey over the mountain. Most people in the city surrendered to apathy long ago, accepting their joylessness and living unfulfilling lives, trying to avoid asking the question that would destroy their dull-gray, familiar world; they do not dare to hope for something beyond what they have.

This woman was different. She has experienced as much pain as any of her kin, but never gave in to despair. Each moment of pain pulled on her- “why do I have to feel this way? Isn’t there supposed to be something other than this emptiness?” It was like a memory that she couldn’t remember, an instinct that she had never noticed.

So she left her city in search of her home. A home, she believed, would feel like one. It would be unquestionable, obvious, like remembering that word on the tip of your tongue. She said nothing to anyone about her flight, her people are not capable of love, not real love, not the type of love she knew by not knowing.

The mountain at first begged her to stay in her city. It pleaded with her feet to turn around. When the feet did not listen, the rocks and gravel began to work on her hands, scraping and scratching like a toddler pulling on her father’s sleeve. “Please don’t go,” the mountain whimpered. “This is your home… things will get better if you just wait.” She ignored the bonding cry as she pushed herself to her limits to cross the uncrossable, do the undoable, feel the unfeelable.

Impatient and a bit fearful, the mountain abandoned kindness for threats. “You’ll lose everyone you know if you don’t turn back now.”

“If they love me, they will understand.”

“You’ll give up soon and turn back, but by then it will be too late, the life you knew will be gone.”

“That wasn’t living. I don’t want to go back, accepted or otherwise.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t stop! No one crosses me! No one escapes! Is oblivion preferable to dullness?”

But she climbed ever onward. There was nothing behind her. For all she knew, there was nothing ahead of her either. Oblivion was not preferable to dullness. The act of searching (even if it ends in oblivion) for that which makes living worthwhile- that feeling of rightness and connectedness- the act of searching itself outweighs the fear of pain, even the fear of nothingness.

The mountain gave up negotiating and tried to fulfill its threat. Rocks careened down at her, some just narrowly skirting her frail body. Pits to nowhere opened under her feet, but she held fast at the last moment, saving her body from perilous falls. Irate, outside itself with anger at her continued defiance, the mountain roared at her as she approached the summit. Smoke began to spill out of the peak, streaming toward her. Lava followed slowly behind, twisting viscously in the grooves made by previous flows. She took shelter behind a large boulder. The smoke and molten rock parted around her haven, pulling her into a world of heat and darkness. She covered her face and steeled herself for the end.

Burned and coughing, she dared to open her eyes. Through the thinning smoke, she could see her city. Firelight in the darkness of night spanned the distance to her eyes. “Perhaps I have been a fool.” She allowed herself a moment of doubt in the face of certain death. She turned her body away from home, and was allowed the first glimpse anyone from her city had ever enjoyed of the other side.

She saw paradise, but knew herself to be apart from it. She felt the unending joy calling her over, that feeling she could never describe staring her in the face. And she realized she did not belong there. “Mountain,” she choked the words out. “I am ready to return to my city now.”

The lava flow slowed and stopped, but only on one side of the rock, the side from which she had come. “Do you see now why I must keep you in isolation?” The mountain boomed gently.

A cruel master can be the greatest teacher. If you are being taught something that cannot be understood, you cannot be allowed to understand the lesson. It wouldn’t work, you’d never learn anything that way.

The way home was forthright, and honest. The mountain held her hand and guided her carefully around the crevasses. When she returned, her people asked if she had been to the other side.

“No, I did not touch ground on the other side of the mountain. But I did get a glimpse of what exists there, what life can be like if we allow ourselves to feel it.”

They listened hungrily as she described the lights that shine out from the other side. Something in them had always known, but hearing it from another allowed them to believe that they had heard it before in their own hearts. Life is not meaningless, and something out there is real.