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Shattered Happiness
An unreleased short story from the book:
The Price of Emotions: How Artificial Feelings Can Destroy Us
Hannah had always felt as though something was missing, a hollow space inside of her that no one could fill. She had everything the world said was necessary: a good job, a nice apartment, friends who made her laugh, a family who loved her. But none of it seemed real to her. There was a dissonance between what her life appeared to be and the way she felt. Every morning she woke up with an overwhelming sense of nothingness, a cold weight in her chest that threatened to swallow her whole.
She had spent years trying to ignore it, trying to fill it with work, with distractions, with relationships that never lasted. She tried yoga, she tried therapy, she even tried taking long walks in nature. But nothing could touch the void inside her. It was always there, lurking in the background of her existence, reminding her that no matter how much she accumulated, she would always feel empty.
One night, as Hannah sat at her kitchen table, scrolling aimlessly through her phone, she came across an ad. It was simple, almost too simple, but the words struck her like a bolt of lightning.
“Buy Happiness: One drop, and the emptiness will vanish. Feel complete. No more loneliness. Embrace joy.”
She stared at the words for a long moment, the weight of them pressing down on her. Could it be real? Could she finally feel what she had been missing? What if this was the answer?
Her mind buzzed with anticipation, a flicker of hope igniting in the depths of her despair. She clicked the link.
A few days later, a plain brown package arrived at her door. Inside was a small vial of clear liquid, the label reading: “One drop. Feel complete.”
Hannah didn’t hesitate. She unscrewed the cap and swallowed the drop, her body trembling with a strange mixture of excitement and fear. At first, nothing happened. Her heart fluttered with the tiniest glimmer of hope, but then… nothing.
She waited, and just as she was about to convince herself it had all been a scam, something stirred inside her. It wasn’t a rush of joy or excitement. It was more like… peace. A strange, unfamiliar peace that spread from her chest outward, tingling in her fingers, her toes. She felt lighter, as though the weight she had carried for so long was finally being lifted, the walls around her thoughts slowly dissolving. She felt a brief, tender sense of connection with everything around her—the sunlight filtering through her window, the way the trees outside swayed in the breeze. It was like seeing the world through new eyes.
For the first time in years, she felt… whole.
But as the hours passed, the initial calm began to shift. The peace, instead of expanding, became an oppressive silence. The world around her seemed suddenly too bright, too loud. Her senses, once dulled by the emptiness, were now overwhelmed by the very things she had once found comforting. The sunlight was too warm, the trees too still. A creeping dread settled over her, thickening with every passing second. The peace she had felt was now a quiet, suffocating pressure, squeezing her chest until she could barely breathe. The more she tried to hold onto that fleeting sense of wholeness, the more it slipped through her fingers.
She tried to go about her day. Her coworkers noticed the change in her demeanor. “You seem… different,” one of them remarked. But Hannah couldn’t explain it. She couldn’t put into words what had happened to her, what she was feeling. It was as though the happiness had been a drug, one that had given her just enough to make her crave more.
Days passed, and the initial feeling of wholeness faded entirely. What remained was not peace, but a profound sense of loss. Hannah couldn’t stop thinking about how much less she felt now, how much emptier everything had become. The happiness, that drop, hadn’t filled her—it had revealed the full extent of her emptiness, like a mirror that showed only what she lacked.
She tried to take another drop, but the result was the same—an initial burst of fleeting joy that quickly unraveled into a deeper, more suffocating sense of desolation. Each drop made the emptiness feel more like a tangible force, more like something that owned her, that consumed her every waking moment.
The relationships she had, once so comforting, felt shallow. The people in her life seemed distant, their words empty echoes in a room filled with nothing. The loneliness that had always been a shadow in the back of her mind now consumed her entirely. It was as if the happiness had pulled the veil back, revealing the depths of the isolation she had always felt but never been able to articulate.
At night, she couldn’t sleep. The silence in her apartment was deafening. She would toss and turn, desperately trying to escape the overwhelming feeling of disconnection that had seeped into her bones. The more she tried to fill the void, the bigger it became. She couldn’t stop thinking about all the things she had missed—the life she thought she had and the happiness she had believed was just beyond her reach.
But now that she had touched it, even for a moment, it had shattered her. The hunger was insatiable, gnawing at her insides like a ravenous beast. Every attempt to find meaning, to fill the emptiness, only left her feeling more hollow, more broken.
Her friends stopped calling. Her family couldn’t understand what was wrong. They told her she just needed time, that things would get better. But how could they understand? How could they know what it felt like to be swallowed by a desire for something that could never be satisfied? They couldn’t. And neither could she.
She stared at herself in the mirror one night, her face pale and drawn, her eyes hollow. The woman staring back at her wasn’t the same person who had swallowed that drop. She was someone else—someone consumed by a longing for something that didn’t exist, a woman who had bought happiness only to find that it didn’t exist outside of her own mind.
There was no more joy. There was no more peace. There was only the unbearable silence, the overwhelming weight of the void that would never be filled. She had thought happiness would save her, but in the end, it had shown her that the emptiness was all she had ever known.
And now, there was nothing left.
The happiness had shattered her, and in its place, there was only the raw, painful truth of who she had always been.
A woman trapped in a life that was never truly hers. A life where nothing could ever fill the void.
If you enjoyed this short story you will probably like our latest release available now:
The Price of Emotions: How Artificial Feelings Can Destroy Us
$3.99
In a world where emotions are bought and sold, the price of feeling has never been higher.
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