What was I feeling, anyway?

What was I feeling, anyway? Was it regret? But regret does not feel the way I felt. Regret always has something of a clinging to it, but this feeling did not have any clinging. It was a feeling of being suspended above all the known and being uncertain in your deepest core. Or, it was a feeling of your core being exposed and peeled through so that the sun shone where you never thought it would shine. Or maybe like this: like the surprise you feel when you are expecting to be surprised. The only way to truly be surprised, according to an old philosopher who dressed in rags and ate raw plants, using the fire in his home only to warm his bones after wandering through forests and other abandoned places.

It was a wild type of joy, what I was feeling. For joy, joy is never what you expect. We expect joy to be a happiness and to readily paint a happy smile on our faces. We expect joy to stay with us throughout all the mishaps and happenstances of our lives. We want it to return to us as soon as it can whenever it leaves us. Joy, however, does not play by any of these rules, and makes sure through its wiles that we not forget this.

I stepped inside the shop like it was another day at work, but noticed in the first hour of the morning that the day was different than other days. We cannot expect one day to be like the others, and we are cruel to our days and curse them if we do expect that. This day was different, first because I was being watched more than usual. I knew it. I could feel it. Every time I snuck away from the front of the store to go into the bathroom and make myself forget about all the work we had to do out there, I knew, just knew that the cameras lining the walls were somehow extended into the bathroom, and that I would be spied on for whatever I did in the bathroom, whether fulfill by cravings and lusts or stand or sit there morose and unfulfilled.

But I didn’t care and did what I did anyway in the bathroom. After relieving myself of the greatest pressure in there, I suddenly felt this impossible feeling. It was a quick and sudden liberation, this feeling. This joy. For again, it was joy or like joy, and overwhelmed me with the satisfaction that it is indifferent whether I ever return to work again. When I walked out of the bathroom for the seventh time, I returned to the counter, my work station. I stayed there the rest of the shift, smiled to patrons when they came in, helped them lift shirts off the top rack, shared little stories with them and even smaller jokes. I had on the same uniform as usual, and appeared prepared to stay the day and many days to come. But in reality I was gone, gone gone, dissatisfied with the minutiae but all along affirming the whole.