Satisfaction maybe. I’m only truly happy during those brief moments when I am creating something and it is nearly complete. A fleeting elation, near the end, but before I put my pen down. I can see the future and it is an electric mirage. It is right around the next line laid upon the page, or the six after that, but it is close, and the feeling of that nearness is nearly nirvana. When I am most wholly in love with the work and rid of self perception.
But it is so incredibly transitory, so brief. A slender slippery knife lifts a permeable patch of spine and slides inside; and I am animated suddenly. I am forced to leap, the glee explosive and I clap like a child, dance around to the music between my vertebrae. Flooded and full, I rise until my toes leave the hardwood and sawdust of my workshop floor; it ebbs quickly, the warm water inside me breaks as a crested wave, and draws back coolly with a shiver.
So short that by the time I actually complete, I have replayed the memory a thousand times. The satisfaction of the finish is a photocopy minted in my mind, slight and dry. My critical eye withers the edges of my creation to repeal fine defined lines and finds only the trembling stuttered oafish broken, insincere and ill-aligned. The satisfaction salve a momentary conjuring before the seams are examined in the harsh light of analytical hindsight.
Still, that effervescent flash is enough. A close and fleeting approximation of happiness that serves as drive to try again. Ten thousand hours for a five second high. Six million self recriminations to balance off six seconds of blissful satisfaction.