Delight is perhaps what I want, not happiness.
Aligned with happiness on the happy/sad dichotomy, delight slides by unnoticed, undermining clarity, removing light. To de-light in something, is perhaps to turn the lights off in a room or click off your phone screen at night, to feel darkness diffuse into space.
“I am happy about…” is clunky. About? Books are about things sometimes. Boats come about, I think. Or about can mean approximately. Or on the subject of. I am done being happy about things, I prefer to delight in them.
When I delight in something, I inhabit it. The closeness of that preposition, in, warms me. I delight in dawn or dusk, or in smooth stones, jagged cliffs or great big cities. I get to become part of them without (par)taking. It feels so not possessive to delight in things.
My greatest delight is in light language, which dissolves on the ear like powdered sugar on the tongue.
Julien Luebbers is a writer and student in southern California. He resides on the web @Joolee_in on Twitter.