Sad Kid

There was a kid who was generally a very happy kid; he had never had any toys and he never had any friends, but he was pretty unfazed by that. It had just been that way, and he had no memory of anything else. He didn't have any siblings and he didn't actually have parents. He entertained himself enough, though, and he grew up just like kids grow up; he became a young man. One day when he was a young man, his captor opened the steel doors behind which he had been imprisoned in the concrete cellar, and the light burst in so strongly that his eyes first teared and then he cried in blood in the agony. He walked out of the enclosure a free human being. For years, until he was well into his thirties, he was an observer of how things worked in the free world outside of the cellar. It fascinated him and he took pleasure in participating, if only as an impostor, in the quotidian rituals of the people he'd met on the outside. He learned from the experiences about what was normal and what people need to feel happiness, and his closest aquaintances encouraged him to tell his story. So he took up residence at a cottage on a lake and began to write about it. But without the empty companionship of other people doing the things that people do (joylessly and without everyday thanks), all he could see was beauty (the beauty of his freedom), and his eyes began to bleed again. They bled ceaselessly for weeks and weeks and all he could see was red, the red of the anger that he'd never felt such happiness until now. It was the happiness itself that made him so sad. After many years as a writerly cottage-man with often bleeding eyes, he returned to the cellar in the hopes that he could destroy some part of it, deface it, damage the pain it caused him and finally move on. But all he found was comfort in the pain, as it was all he had ever known in his early life. He realized that his release had damaged his eyes from seeing the reality that his joy was the saddest thing of all, the simplest thing in his life and only accessible through the sharp pain of his misfortune; he wept for all the people he'd met who had never been kept in the cellar. After he returned to his cottage he finished his book with his complete experience and epiphany. The book was all over talk shows and everybody read it and they wept for him as they read the blood-stained pages of the tears he cried for them. Then he was rich and he added on to his cabin, but every morning when he woke up, he panicked when he saw the light that was let in through the beautiful new glass walls, and this was how he lived for the rest of his life, in perpetual fear of the sunshine.