Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

“They might look at her first. But they’ll want to look at you for longer.”

But my mother’s interest in interiors never extended beyond complaining about them as they were.

Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.

Nobody said anything. The music was extraordinary. The sensation was physical, like warm water being washed over a wound, agonizing and cleansing and curative.

My perception of Winsome belonged to my mother—I thought of her as old, punctilious, someone without an interior life or worthwhile passions. That was the first time I saw her for myself. Winsome was an adult, someone who took care, who loved order and beauty and labored to create it as a gift to other people.

The paper came back with a comment at the bottom. “You write exquisitely and say very little.” My father read the essay and said, “Yes. I think you chewed more than you bit off.”

I wanted to become someone else. I wanted to belong to anyone else. I wanted everything to be different. Before he actually asked me and so he wouldn’t get down on one knee in front of my family, I said yes.

That scene and every other seemed to vibrate with brilliance and humor as I typed them. The next day they read like the work of a fifteen-year-old with encouraging parents.

I had moved in and out of an apartment, been married, abroad, ill and thrown out, and Patrick was wearing the shirt he’d had on at Jonathan’s dinner, the last time I had seen him. I could not make sense of it, that I was entirely changed and he wasn’t changed at all.

I said yes, right and got up quickly to go and get a broom because I did not want to cry in front of him. He wasn’t in the kitchen when I came back with it, and there weren’t any broken pieces left on the floor for me to sweep up.

And now, I did not want her to know that, so afraid, I’d still let Jonathan’s assured way of being and his propulsive energy overwhelm me and make me think I wasn’t scared at all.

“I’m fine, Patrick. It’s just been a full day of men who loved me once then stopped or thought they were in love with me, then realized they were just hungry or something.”

“I have never understood why people think of champagne as celebratory rather than medicinal.” A waitress was pouring it, clearly to his mind the wrong way and as she moved to fill the second glass, he thanked her and said that we could manage things from here. I sat down and he put a glass in my hand. “Surely the only time one needs one’s blood effervesced is when life is utterly flat.”

“Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is vastly better than crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.” I laughed and Peregrine looked unhappy. “I am not being whimsical, Martha. Short another, beauty is a reason to live.”

“Nostos, Martha, returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.” Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed.

was only conscious of myself in terms of Patrick; whether I was, just then, being looked at by him, if so how he perceived me. My bearing and my expression, the direction of my gaze—it was all for Patrick.

I was so happy for her and did not know how I was going to survive it.

It said “Happy birthday to the world’s best mother, daughter, wife of a mid-ranking civil servant, neighbor, shop customer, employee, council-tax payer, crosser of roads, recent NHS admission, her sister’s entire universe.”

On the plane, he asked me if I was going to change my name. He had just finished a crossword in the in-flight magazine that a previous passenger had already started. I said I wasn’t. “Because of the patriarchy?” “Because of the paperwork.”

I did not know how to be a wife. I was so scared. Patrick looked so happy.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re unhappy. It’s not a good enough reason. If you’re just bored and it’s all a bit hard and you don’t feel like you love them anymore, who cares. You made a deal.”

Before you had kids, you got to think you were a good person so then you secretly resent them for making you realize you’re actually a monster.”

“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.”

“But I’m sure at the end of our lives we will all be thinking, if only I’d consumed more content.”

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.

At night I read until I fell asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid’s dresser. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.

You Should Just Go For It. Everyone Is Sick Of Hearing You Talk About It. Follow Your Dreams. The Stakes Could Not Be Lower.