Spots

Emma had concluded, after observing herself throughout a variety of circumstances and over a sufficiently long period of time (long enough to make sure it wasn’t a coincidental upward flux in her ever changing emotional landscape), that she was, finally, happy.
It had started as a small, clear spot in her usually foggy gloom. A clean, brilliant patch on a mud splattered window. The spot was very different from what she was used to, and although she liked it (she liked it a lot), she was above all fascinated by its exotic strangeness.
At first, the spot came and went at irregular intervals. The feeling was so unfamiliar to her that she never missed its sudden absence, and welcomed each reappearance only with a jolted kind of surprise.
But the spot grew, and this didn’t happen gradually, it happened at once. One day, the window was suddenly totally clean, and the yellow, fiery energy of the sun shone right into her face. Emma, of course, didn’t believe this would last. She didn’t even consider the possibility. She thought the clean window was an extremely welcome but rare emotional incident; something to savour, but too good to be felt more than once or twice in a lifetime.
Indeed, after a short while, the window darkened again. Filth cluttered the corners, and a soft translucent screen of dried-up mud once more overlaid the glass. Emma almost relaxed. But then the clear spot reappeared. And then she felt that total clearness again. And after a few of these cycles, the total clearness stayed.
So Emma had to conclude, even after careful scrutiny by her rational survivor mind, that she was happy.
This was extremely unsettling for her. Darkness she could steer trough quite well. This light however needed a different approach.