Sorrow looked down at his feet with mournful eyes, wide and dark and solemn as Love pranced around and danced in the field before him, laughing and chortling all the while. “Sorrow,” she sang with glowing face and sparkling smile, “come dance with me, please.”

“No,” he sighed.

“But why?”
“You know that I cannot.”

She pouted, pausing in her playful antics to look at him instead, arms akimbo and eyes heartfelt. “But you can,” Love said sweetly, “You simply think that you cannot. Come, Sorrow, I’ll show you the way.”

“No, no, Love, you know that I cannot dance, I cannot sing, I cannot smile as you do. I am not meant to be that, that of sunshine and rainbows and…love.”

Love moaned, canting her head to one side as she fell back in the field, straight on her back as he craned his neck to keep sight of her in the high-growing wildflowers. “I know, I know you are Sorrow and as sorrow you encompass misery and grief and—and heartbreak but that does not mean you cannot dance, does not mean you are not allowed your joy. Please, Sorrow? Please?”

His arms came to wrap around his own chest, trying to comfort himself, for, as was always the case when he was with Love, a dull ache had risen in him. He shook his head and rocked back and forth on his heels, wishing to say yes but finding that he couldn’t. “I cannot,” he cried, his eyes going misty, “it is not my place.”

“Yes it is, Sorrow.” Love sprung up in all her splendor and pranced to him, looking up at him with wide eyes and a sprig of purple flowers stuck in her hair. “For at your end is man’s happiness and at man’s happiness is love, therefore it can be your place, too.” And before he had time to truly ponder her words, she grabbed his hands and dragged him out further into the field, the a place where the wildflowers had not yet been trod upon.

“Now before you can say there is no music and no steps, just feel it. Let all this—the wind, the animals, your own breath—let that be your music and let your heart lead you in the steps.”

And so she started to move before him, hearing a song he could not. In her radiance, in her gleaming way, she was enchanting him, making him feel fluid in his bones and he found that he was swaying to some rhythm he did not know, did not recognize. “There you go,” she smiled. “See, you’re doing it.”

He cracked her an awkward smile that seemed more like a grimace, his awkward movement slightly garish because of his too-long limbs, of his lanky frame. Sorrow could never be like Love, for she was unique in her beautiful way, full of vivacity and exuberance. She moved gracefully and purposefully, sharp, crisp movements that never once looked out of place. She fed him lies; sweet lies that made him better than what he was just so he would dance with her. She made him forget his true nature for a moment, throw it to the wind and indulge in her one wish of the day.

And Sorrow found that, for now, even in all his gloom-and-doom, he could not refuse her.

For she was Love.