Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

“Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.”

I’d imagined them Zelda Fitzgeralding their way around Montparnasse or at the very least Jean Rhysing the time away in a darkened room, but the Beautiful and the Damned preferred the suburbs of Woking and so it sits, furnished and vacant.”

Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.”

“So just to confirm. When I asked you, that time, if you were in love with me—” “Utterly,” he said. “I loved you utterly.”

“Martha, no marriage makes sense. Especially not to the outside world. A marriage is its own world.”