For R, with embellishments.  This is the way I remember it, and this is the way I’m going to tell it, and besides this is a more interesting way to to tell it than what actually happened, which means it mustn’t have been that remarkable a story in the first place.

I was the first one to wake up.  The sun had just risen.  It was the country alright, there was a quietness in the air that you wouldn’t get in the city around this time.  Even the chirping of the birds sounded distant and hushed somehow.  Like they’re showing polite respect to the painter in the sky making the pretty colors so early in the morning.

The others were still asleep in various places around the rented summer house. I went to the raised jacuzzi attached to the to the end of the pool.  It had a great view of the valley and the mountain beyond.  I sat down on one of the wooden lounge chairs.  I tried to think of nothing at all, and failed miserably.

Then you came out.  I didn’t know where you slept last night, where you found a place to lie down in the house.  As far as I could tell, everyone crashed at around three in the morning, when the ice ran out.  I myself stopped drinking after my customary two beer limit, just hanging around laughing and singing with the rest of them.  I wasn’t the first nor the last one to sleep, but I vaguely remember you still being up and about as I stood up and told them all that I was going to sleep.  I crashed on an empty couch.

You nodded at me as you approached the pool, and you sat on the other lounge chair.  We looked at the view together.  I had no idea what you were thinking.  If we were the type of people who smoked we’d both have been lighting up by then.

It should have been weird, but it wasn’t.  We just sat and stayed silent.  I was wondering by then if maybe you were still half-asleep.  But then suddenly, out of the blue, you spoke.

“Are you happy?”

It was a loaded question.  I looked over at you, and you were still concentrating on the mountains, and I thought that it was very smart of you not to be looking at me as you asked that because things would have gotten really weird really fast, but you didn’t, so I feigned fascination with the mountains as well while my mind worked out how to answer such a deceivingly simple three word question.

“Are you?” was what I came up with.  Really lame in my opinion.  But the voices in my head told me that if I was talking to someone I liked I would have said something much worse, so that wasn’t so bad.

“I think I am,” you said.

“Which is actually quite sad, if you think about it,”  I couldn’t help saying.  “Are you really, truly happy if you’re not even sure that you’re happy?  Is contentment the same as happiness?  What does it mean to be truly happy anyway?”

You were smiling at me by then.  I knew you liked it when we have this kind of conversation, and you were one of the few people I could let myself go with like this in this way.

“So are you happy or not?” I asked you again, and by this time, somehow, it became a very important question.  I wanted you to say yes, you were happy, very happy in fact.  We were just friends, not even close friends, just classmates for most of our years in university.  I wasn’t into you in that way, and you weren’t into me.  But I wanted you to say that yes, indeed, you were happy, because if you were happy, then I should also be, because, well, I didn’t have an opinion one way or another at that very moment, so I would just take the cue from you.  If you were happy, then I would also be happy.  Never mind that we haven’t even defined what level of happiness we were talking about, or that the question was so maddeningly vague and broad, or that we had totally different situations in life.  You were around my age, we had the same level of education more or less, and we were both intelligent people, and that means if you were happy, or could be happy, then so could I.

“Yes I’m happy,” you answered, still smiling.  But I knew that you really didn’t think about the question very well, but I didn’t mind.  The split second of urgency that I felt when I asked the all-important question was gone now.  Now it was just a silly question again, just something to pass the time with, to joke around with.  Nothing important.

“Really now?” I asked, pretending to believe you but smiling as well.  It’s all good, we were just having fun now, anticipating the delicious conversation ahead, knowing we could have fun with this topic because we were both smart and witty and were such a perfect match for smart and witty banter.  Or rather, I knew it.  I bet you don’t know until now just how much you enjoy talking to me.

“How happy then?” was my follow up question.  “Convince me, make it fun,” was what I meant but didn’t say out loud.

“I’m so happy it hurts!”  You suddenly said, the words blurting out of you with triple exclamation points spiking the air, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.  The timing was perfect.  I told you to prove it further, to shout it out loud, and you did.  I joined you then, and we declared to the mountains, to the skies, to the valley below that we were both happy, so very happy, so very happy it hurts!

Other people were also coming out by then, and we must have been a funny sight, sitting beside that pool laughing so hard we were holding on to the chairs, shouting about how happy we were, and not being able to explain why.  Even now I can’t even explain it as clearly as I want.  It was over ten years ago when that happened.

You probably don’t remember any of this.  Or you do, but you don’t remember as much detail about it as I do.  It’s not important.  It’s just something that happened, among a thousand, no a million, other things that have happened to me before and since then.

And then this could segue into how the speaker wants to kill himself or herself, and that this turned out to be either an email or a suicide letter.  But I’m too lazy to turn it into a real story.  Besides, this really happened, almost exactly the way I told it right now, and I don’t want R to find out that I wrote about it and have to explain myself.  Because it doesn’t really mean anything, it just happened, so I’m writing about it.  And that’s that.