THE INCORRECT MOMENTS?

I used to think happiness

would arrive with trumpets,

a headline across my life

announcing that at last I had earned

the right to breathe easily.

Instead, it keeps turning up

at the most incorrect moments.

Like yesterday, when my inbox

was an open mouth of demands

and my sink was a crowded city of dishes—

I was halfway through hating the day

when I noticed the soap bubbles

making tiny rainbows on a spoon.

For a second, I forgot to be unhappy.

I just watched the color tremble.

Or that time in a hospital corridor,

my hands smelling of sanitizer and fear.

The air was all beeping and fluorescent dread.

Then a toddler went waddling past me,

dragging a balloon that refused

to float properly, bumping along the floor.

For no sane reason, I almost laughed.

Misplaced, indecent happiness,

like a joke whispered at a funeral.

It keeps slipping in

when I am not performing.

Walking home with cheap groceries,

my bag cutting a red mark in my fingers,

I suddenly loved the exact weight of it—

the potatoes, the soap, the little reckless chocolate bar.

Nothing about my life had improved in that moment,

but the sky was bruise-purple,

and a friendly stray dog happily matched my pace,

and I felt briefly forgiven

for not being more successful than I am.

Happiness, for me,

is rarely the big event.

Achievements, promotions, parties—

I pose, I smile, I archive the photos,

but the feeling is often late or lost in transit.

The real thing shows up on random Tuesdays

when the fan is making its soft, dumb music

and I am happily playing with the puppies on the floor,

while no one is watching, i laugh (sometimes like a hyena)

and it does not matter, or rather it should not matter?

There is a strange kindness

in how "unstrategic" it is.

It arrives when I deserve it least—

on mornings I hit snooze,

on evenings I cancel plans

just to lie face-down on the bed

and listen to the ceiling.

Somewhere between the guilt and the dust,

a tiny part of me sighs,

"Oh, so this is also allowed."

I used to chase happiness

like validation, a milestone, a race.

Now I suspect it is more

like a shy tenant in my chest—

not gone when I am sad,

just sitting quietly in the next room,

waiting for me to stop rehearsing disaster

long enough to notice the light

leaking under the door.

If I have learned anything,

it is this:

Happiness in my life

is not the constant state I was promised.

It is a series of small,

glitchy permissions—

to enjoy the calm before the storm,

to somehow like my face in an unflattering mirror,

to laugh while everything in my life may still be unresolved.

The bills may remain, the losses may remain,

the future is still an untrained animal.

But it is these bright, incorrect moments

that unabashedly keep arriving anyway,

soft as a knock I almost miss.

And slowly, I am learning

to leave the door to my heart less bolted,

to set one extra place at my soul's table,

for this unreasonable guest—

trusting that even on difficult days

some small, unexpected happiness

is already on its way to sit beside me. WRITTEN BY, R MAHIMA RAM