This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Maybe I didn’t know it then, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Didn’t know that there are times in a life that pass but retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still. There are many consolations in having a convulsed heart. Among them is being attuned to the music of everyday and awake to all that is shining, stirring, pulsing. I was not sad walking down the avenue from Avalon past the great trees in full leaf, their green heads full of birdsong. I felt not captured but freed. A door had opened, and the world was larger, fuller, more varied, complex and rich than it was when I walked up there. I also had a first understanding that, contrary to science, the heart expands more than it contracts. Some of it too was that a shift had taken place inside me. I understood that I would not be marrying Sophie, Charlie or Ronnie Troy, but could love them all the same, and be happy in the misery of that. All of which to say I came past the ditches noticing the knuckles of the blackthorns ruptured with blossom, and up into the village with the light step of the open-hearted.