The first time I felt joy, it was when Kunle told me he loved me. It was my first time hearing that word. My father never told me and my mother was too dead to tell me anything from the beyond. I was seventeen, and it was his eighteenth birthday. He had this really anxious look on his face and took a deep breath after he said it. 

I loved the way he was nervous, I loved the way he looked at my eyes. It was peace and I loved it, and even though our relationship didn’t last after the seventh month. I felt a tinge of joy.

I had felt happiness in other moments of my life but joy. Joy was a holistic tendency. It only happened at spectacular moment, and whenever I felt it, my toes will curl and I would be uncontrollably giddy. I don’t know what comes with that feeling but I could never control it when it happened. I have felt joy only six times in my entire life, and I am thirty four, with too much advice to give and very few people to advise.  I guess that is the function of life. Sometimes you have too much of everything and you can’t share it, or you have too little and the whole world wants it. There is an imbalance but as one pervert teacher I once had in secondary school would say, “such is life.”

However, I am not here to rant about the seven philosophies of life or how I fell in love with one boy that hardly thinks about me now.  I am here to tell you about the ways I have felt joy,but I don’t want to write much so perhaps I will write about it separately, so I can tell you about the six times I had ever felt joy. Today was the first. I will find you tomorrow. Bye.