Apex Predator

…..she thought fame would be the end-all, cure-all answer to her litany of ailments—both physical and emotional—but she soon learned otherwise.  She discovered that fame is a prison every bit as constraining as the poverty and anonymity she had serially grown to loath in her youth.  Return to that pitiful station in life?  No, she harbored no desire to turn around and trudge backward in time either, even if she had been able to but which of course she wasn’t.  And then a bolt of wisdom struck her—a bolt that had been hiding inside her body all these years, lying low and skulking about in some previously unexplored dark chasm—and she realized that people aren’t meant to live blissful, happy lives.  They just aren’t!  Genuine happiness is a sham, a ruse, an artifice; genuine happiness over an extended period of time is a heartless deception.  Happiness at its very core is a grandiose hallucination cruelly perpetuated from generation to generation by a small but vocal coalition of fantasts and naïfs.  Said is merely the winsome, unrealistic stuff centerpiecing political campaigns, bridal showers, bar mitzvahs, and fairy tales. Real life is an apex predator that is wholly amoral and constantly on the prowl for unwitting victims; it affords precious little time for nonsensical tropes like sanguinity and merrymaking. In the sobering big scheme of things, those much-sought-after entities face extinction and are every bit as endangered as the Siberian tiger and polar ice caps……