if you're happy and you know it

clap your hands!

except,
it's not that easy-

i'm not always sure what i'm feeling.

sometimes i have absolutely no idea.

sometimes i wonder if there are feelings our hearts are capable of that we haven't felt yet. most the time, i just wonder about the names of all the feelings i am feeling and find myself searching in songs, in books, in quotes and conversations for some reassurance that i'm not alone. i search hoping that these feelings will recognize themselves and procure for me an identity that i don't have the words to provide. i just feel them and i hurt and i love and i close my eyes and try to make out some semblance of an outline before my heart puts a stop to it because it can't take it anymore. but i never find the words for these lonely emotions. they feel so heavy and fresh to me, like i'm pioneering some extraneous new-fangled emotions that God decided to give me to test-drive. and even though sometimes i'm left feeling completely isolated, i know i'm not alone- i can't be. but it sure feels like it when i prattle on to people about life and goldenness and beauty and when my emotions resemble splashes of color more than coherent words and when i'm drowning in my memories and nostalgia and acute awareness of how little and fleeting i and everyone i love so intensely are. but maybe none of that is anything unique or strange. after all, we're never as special as we think. but maybe there's a frequency of feelings that escape most people's radars, like how dogs can hear high-pitched sounds that we can't. or maybe there are some people who are the super-tasters of emotional taste-buds- super-feelers. or maybe everyone feels them, these lonely intense emotions, but we all keep quiet because every time we try to open our mouths and identify them, the emotions surge up from where we had thought they'd finally settled, perhaps somewhere behind a kidney, and they steal away with the words we'd finally found to describe them.