Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

Once he had gone she said, “You must feel so lucky, being married to a man like that.” I said yes and thought about explaining the drawbacks of being married to somebody who everybody thinks is nice, but instead I asked her where she got her amazing hat and waited for Patrick to come back.

They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself. * * *

Last year, I got glasses that I do not need because the optometrist fell off his rolling stool during the eye-test. He looked so mortified I started reading the letters wrongly on purpose. They are in the glove box, still in the bag.

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. * * *

That is why eventually I stopped taking anything and why I stopped seeing so many doctors, and then none for a long time, and why eventually everyone—my parents, Ingrid, and later Patrick—came to concur with my self-diagnosis of being difficult and too sensitive, why nobody thought to wonder if those episodes were separate beads on one long string.

There was a second of intense quiet before my father started to applaud like a recent convert to classical music who is not sure if you are meant to between movements.

“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.”

“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. At the gate to his platform, Peregrine kissed me on both cheeks and said, “November,” and I knew it would be my birthday.

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

One day, years later, my mother would tell me that no marriage makes sense to the outside world because, she would say, a marriage is its own world. And I would dismiss her because by then ours had come to its end. But that was what it felt like, for the minute before we said goodbye outside my parents’ house, Patrick’s arms around me and my face turned into his neck. I hadn’t said I loved him, properly in the way he just had, but it is what I meant when I said, “Thank you, Patrick,” and went inside.

The third time, it felt like we had been melted down and made into another thing. We lay for so long afterwards, facing each other in the dark, not talking, our breath in the same pattern, our stomachs touching. We went to sleep that way and woke up that way. It was the happiest I have ever felt.

As an adult, she told me that it felt so real in the moment, but afterwards she couldn’t believe she’d got so upset and thought she would never do it again. She never apologized afterwards and my parents did not make her. But, she said, “it didn’t matter, she knew they were still thinking about it” and her shame was so intense it made her angry at us. “Instead of like, hating myself.” Throwing something at your husband is the same. I was so ashamed afterwards, it made me angrier at Patrick than I had already become for his never being around.

I did not tell anyone what had happened and afterwards only cried if Patrick was out—as soon as he left, from the effort of containing it. In short, intense bursts at the recollection of what I had been about to do. For minutes, as I moved around the house, weeping in gratitude that she had let go of me first.

“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.”

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

And then—you. My beautiful daughter, breaking when she was still a child. Even though you were the one in pain, even though I chose not to help you, in my own mind it was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

I was the victim, and victims of course are allowed to behave however they like. Nobody can be held to account as long as they’re suffering and I made you my unassailable excuse for not growing up.

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.

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.

“Forgotten is forgiven.” For whatever reason, Winsome said it again. I repeated it after her. “Forgotten is forgiven.”

When people discover that you and your husband were separated for a time but have since reconciled, they put their head on the side and say, “Clearly you never stopped loving him deep down.” But I did. I know I did. It is easier to say yes, you’re so right, because it is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice.