Chasing happiness

Happiness. More of a curse than a blessing, truth be told, but it seems to be everyone's goal. To achieve happiness, they say. To be happy.
Humans themselves are the definition of improbability.
And yet, having anything better to do at the time, I pledged myself in the pursuit of happiness. Not in the human sense, mind you, of willing to be happy, or struggling so hard to be happy that one gets extremely bitter and frustrated all the way. No, I merely wanted to find it. And here I say "it" because, well, back then I knew nothing of happiness' true shape. Was it human or animal? Or a plant, even? Male or female? For all I knew, it could well be a smooth, round stone lost in some river bed.
I will bother you not, my dear reader, with all the details of my expedition. I fear it would get a little bit too long and that you would become not just a little bit too bored and annoyed. I'll thus skip that part and all i'll tell you is, I've found happiness.
And since I did it, I find myself in position to tell you that happiness is one of the most remarkable things in the universe. To begin with, it is shapeless, and this feature strikingly means that happiness can indeed be male or female, human or animal, or plant, even. It can be a smooth round stone on the river bed. This it explained to be when we talked, remember ing old shapes it took. Happiness' shape varies with the will and the desire of its founder. It has been the smooth round stone in a child's hands. It has been a lover. It has been a well plundered field. It has been a puppy and a kitty, sometimes even a flower - its favourite, it told me, was the white water-lily, but since they are so hard to get happiness has to go as red roses most of times, and it secretely hates it. It has been a shooting star bursting in the night sky. Once, it has even been an apple falling to the ground near some man.
By now, you, my dear reader, have undoubtedly found other remarkable things about happiness, like the fact that it speaks. "Well of course I do", it said when I asked the same thing, but I'm skipping too many bits of our conversation. What you have not yet guessed is the shape it took to address me, and that's something I'm sorry to say that will be left out of this little tale. As I said, its shape depends on it's founder desire, and I had no desire of any kind, other than to find it - which, I suspect, made me unwillingly cause some trouble to happiness. But above all, happiness is truly courteous, and after some thinking, it decided to present itself to me in its true shape.
We struck into conversation, of course. Casual conversation. Ironically enough, when I asked how was it, it replied "sad", which truly amazed me. The last thing I expected was happiness to be sad. It makes sense, though. As it explained to me, most people seek happiness not knowing what they truly want - and sometimes not knowing whether they can bear what they want, or whatever the road to what they want implies. And even though everyone finds it now and then, it is just for a simple, ethereal moment, one that eventually is over, a kiss that eventually breaks. That, it said, is its true nature: not to be constant, a goal in itself, but something that human beings get to warm their hearts and bring a smile to their lips now and then. They walk around oblivious to it though, and their aching desire to be happy, as they say, makes them miss it rather often. Its sadness came from this: from people's unability to comprehend it.
"I suppose you don't have company that often then", i said.
It did, but as it replied, its company never lasts long. People miss it so often, and at some point they remember some moment of their life and they realise they were happy in that moment. It was true, happiness told me, it had been there in that moment. But they had not noticed it, and the memory that surfaced years before was no longer happy, but incredibly sad. No, being happiness was no easy task at all. Many where the days then happiness itself thought about it like a curse.
Just like me, I thought, but I didn't say it. I asked instead what could be done to change that.
Happiness told me it didn't know what could be changed. Perhaps there was nothing there to change, and things were meant to be just the way they were. But such an idea did not satisfied me. Things should change, I thought. People should learn to be aware of happiness, so they'd value all the more - and it wouldn't feel as miserable as it does now. I thought that could be my next goal, but for such a quest I would need to find someone truly happy. And somehow I suspected that it would be even harder than to find happiness itself. But that, I might leave for another tale.