Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

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.

“Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop.

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

“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 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.”