Overheard Starbuck

"I was a happy kid for reasons I now know had little to do with reality."
---"If you knew then what you know now, would you've been as happy? ... Would you know what you know now?"
"A dreamy kid who unlike most of my kind didn't see his dreams come to life in movies, music or in books until my late teens. ... A nerd who was no good in math or art and not much better in sports."
---"Polymorphously happy.--A useless nerd is a dork, by the way. ... Are you ever as happy now as you were then?
"I can't think about happiness. Since becoming an adult I've files to the ceiling of topographic maps for sadness and depression but happiness remains off limits--terra incognita."
---"I wasn't gonna say anything but I've noticed the cold fusion of your aura--its dull pulsing glow. When people like you go off... ... I can picture you as a kid, oblivious to the adult world. I can see you on a summer's evening running in the backyard secretly imagining yourself a firefly--unaware of Disney's Tinkerbell. Never king of the fireflies, but half-boy half-firefly; more friend to them then they to you--neither here nor there, signaling to no one."
"Thanks for the memory."