On the surface, I wouldn’t strike anybody as someone cheerful and perky. In fact, I know that it takes me a while to warm up to anybody. At the few social gatherings I attend I would be what people used to call a wallflower–I would talk to the few people I know and speak only to those who spoke to me. I was never forward. In terms of being funny, well, I know a few people whom I would call funny but I don’t think it applies to me. My attempts at humor–the successful ones at least–seem confined to word-plays and some attributed to my askew manner of observation. Some find humor in my social awkwardness, while still some would think of my humor as wry, if not bordering on the sarcastic. Otherwise, my humor is largely unintentional.
But very few people know me past the bright eyes, the impish smile, and the laughter. Very few people know that I have this great capacity for melancholia. It’s like there is a well deep within my chest, or ample belly, that continuously taps me on the shoulder, like an insistent beggar of my attention. It is this well that I constantly turn to when I tire of the world. It allows me to wallow in its darkness until such time I am ready to emerge and face the light of day. In a way, sadness nurtures me.