There are mornings when the air itself conspires toward a fragile optimism. I woke on such a morning, sunlight sliding across the floorboards, and for a moment the weight in my chest seemed lighter, almost absent. Nina Simone’s Feeling Good played in my head — a song too large for my room, yet it filled the corners with its brass and promise.

But joy, I realised, is often a rehearsal rather than a performance. One hums the melody in private, testing whether the notes will hold when exposed to the street outside.

Murakami once wrote of how music can be both shield and weapon, capable of transforming the banal into the uncanny. That morning, the song transformed the act of boiling water into ritual: steam rising like an oracle, announcing not the future but the bare fact of my solitude.

I thought of you, inevitably. Could happiness be authentic if it required the ghost of another to frame it? Was my sense of “feeling good” genuine, or merely a defiance shouted into the cavern of your absence?

Kafka intruded here. He reminds us that even joy may carry its own bureaucracy, silent officials stamping every gesture with suspicion. Was I allowed to be happy without you? Would some unseen clerk file a complaint against my laughter? In that sense, my optimism already contained its trial.

Later, walking through the city, I saw people moving with the weary choreography of routine. Yet the song still echoed, and I caught myself smiling at nothing. Turgenev would have noticed the same: how the smallest flicker of beauty — the tilt of light on a stranger’s hair, the crisp sound of leaves swept by a careless wind — can momentarily dissolve despair. I clung to these details as though they were proof that the world, despite everything, had not entirely abandoned grace.

Still, memory pressed close. Kundera insists that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. My private struggle felt smaller but no less urgent: the attempt to preserve joy against the encroachment of longing. Every time the song repeated in my head, it carried both triumph and irony — triumph because I could still feel it, irony because you were its absent audience.

By evening the optimism had thinned. Yet even its residue mattered. For a few hours, I had tasted the possibility of another life — one not structured around absence, but around a quiet resilience.

And perhaps that is what “feeling good” really means: not an absolute state, but a temporary reprieve, a reprieve that recognises its own fragility. Like sunlight across the floorboards: already fading, but no less real for that.