Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

The music was extraordinary. The sensation of it was physical, like warm water being washed over a wound, agonising and cleansing and curative.

‘Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is a different thing to crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.’

Short another, beauty is a reason to live.’

‘First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.’

She flicked her hair. ‘Just that feeling of like, thank God when you see that person. Martha, do you know what I’m talking about?’ I said yes. Thank God is how I felt when I saw Patrick that day. Not a thrill or affection or pleasure. Visceral relief.

The baby hiccoughed. My sister laughed. I said, ‘What’s the best thing about it?’ Without taking her eyes off her son, Ingrid said, ‘This. All of it. I mean, it’s shit, but all of it. Especially,’ she yawned, ‘the time between finding out you are pregnant and telling anyone, including your husband. Even if it’s just a week or one minute in my case. No one talks about that part.’ She went on to describe a sense of privacy so singular and ecstatic that, as desperate as she felt to tell someone, it was still painful to give up. She said, ‘You feel the most intense inner superiority because everyone is oblivious to the fact you have gold inside you.

‘Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.’

That he continued taking notes was peculiarly affecting to me. The grace of it, I think, his acting as though it was something worthy of his writing down.

‘But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ‘because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.’

I wanted to tell him what had just happened. I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn’t known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn’t explain it properly. I didn’t feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.

Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else. Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?

‘The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.’