The Happy Prince

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There was once a sad prince. He wasn't really a prince, but some people (well, one person at any rate) called him the prince of posh, and once upon a time he had been a King of Corn, so for the purposes of this little parable he was a slightly blue-blooded prince.

Anyway, the point is that he was aggrieved.

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Grief, according to Kubler-Ross -

In a nutshell, there're five stages.

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

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He was used to grieving, it had become second nature. It's a fucked up world, and as we get older, we realise more and more that people fuck each other over all the time... and with every subsequent fuckover his heart grew just a little more cynical and cold. Sometimes he got screwed over by purported "friends", and he'd watch it happening to himself and laugh.

Something happened one day, and one suspects it happened in the prince's head.

Then try as he might, grief seemed to have taken a hiatus...

He was sad from time to time, of course... life is all about little moments in time.

But where for the longest time he had lived in an relative absence of sadness, interspersed with the occasional happy moment...

Now he found himself smiling at the quirky little messages on his mobile screen, as he blundered down the street oblivious to the people around him...

... laughing as someone struck him hard on the shoulder, again and again...

... trying not to smile, looking into her eyes, then glancing away, then irresistably being drawn back again...

... and laughing again at her, and with her, and with the clever and funny little things she said from time to time.

... and trying not to smile, and failing, as he watched her lolling on a park bench by the waterside struggling valiantly not to fall asleep in what she called sunshine, and the rest of the world would have called dreary, overcast twilight.

And often when he laughed, he really laughed.