This is my first animated short and my first spoken word poem. It's dedicated to all the people who have helped me find my Happy. I hope this helps you find yours. x
Written & Directed by: Hazel Hayes
Animated by Cayleigh Maloye:    / cayllles  
...with Chloe Dungate:    / scarfdemon  
Score by Tom Barnes: http://www.tombarnesmusic.com/
Sound Design by Dan Pugsley: http://www.danpugsley.co.uk/

Special thanks to Cayleigh Maloye for all her hard work, late nights and enthusiasm for this project. Couldn't have done it without you Cay Cay! :)

HAPPY
"I just want to be happy", she said. Then she cried. Because for years now she had tried and failed to catch it, to hold it, to keep it. She searched for happy. She set up camp. And she watched and waited, it’s absence amplified by her impatience.

She hunted it, like prey. She stalked it and followed it day after day and sometimes spied it on a distant hill, but running and shouting at happy will only scare it away.

She saw it in the clouds now and then; a castle, a puppy, a dragon... but when she closed her eyes and opened them again the shapes shifted and rolled and were no more. And her memory of them seemed so fuzzy and unsure.

She felt it on the beach, like waves around her feet. Swelling, breaking, receding. Swelling, breaking, receding. And she ran the length of the shoreline with a sieve in hand but didn’t seem to understand that simply would not do.

And so she sat, defeated, wondered, "Why is it so fleeting? And why do all these awful feelings seem to linger? Why have I, for some reason found a way to keep them, even bottled them and labelled them and stored them on the shelf? So I could torture myself? So I could open them and drink them down and spend the morning bed bound, incapable of even simple things?"

And there it is.

She takes some paper and a pen and makes a note of all the times when happiness crept in. From the corner of her eye she spots it, elusive, shy, it has a way of stopping by, a welcome guest that never makes a fuss. That waits till you don’t care to come and make it’s home there, in the simple things.

Her mother’s hands, her lover’s arms, the shoulders of her friends. Her home, her job, the feeling of soft cotton on her skin. Silence falling before the show begins. Her heart opening up to let love in. And the feeling of it healing after breaking. The deep lungful of salty air that she takes in. And holds. And exhales.

She sketches the scenes. She stacks them high and soon enough they tell the story of her life. And it is, surprise, surprise, a happy one with sadness in it, and not the other way around.

She pins them all up in a row and watches them unfold, like a movie and she sees it is as it should be; a comedy, a tragedy, sometimes both, sometimes in between. And yes, happiness is fleeting but it comes and goes and comes back again. And you don't get to tell it when.

Now she sits beside it on the hill. It grazes quietly while she sits still and resists the urge to reach out and touch it. Sometimes she lies in the sand, lets the waves wash over her and knows, that the tide ebbs and flows. And flows. And flows.