Gravity Is the Thing

by Jaclyn Moriarty

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.

Listen: You have wings yourself. You just don’t recognize them yet.

This is the Rule of Three.

Rule of Three. How the barrister told me that if you say something three times it’s true.

Hope is like a giant soap bubble, and you roll around inside it, smiling while it deflates, slowly, cruelly, until you’re walking around with this sticky consistency, wrapped across your flesh.

My soul is so heavy that no longer can any thought sustain it, no wingbeat lift it up into the ether. If it moves, it only sweeps along the ground like the low flight of birds when a thunderstorm is brewing.

But, in fact, my brother, my husband, my baby—it’s my fault. It has always been my fault.

“Who is she to be telling you the right way to grieve! You can grieve however you like, Wilbur! There’s no right way!”

flight of the human spirit?”

my brother had died before I even knew that he was missing.

people who say you never recover from the loss of a child.