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.

Out of Ingrid’s sons, the middle one is my favourite because he is shy and anxious and ever since he could walk, a constant holder-on to things – handfuls of her skirt, his older brother’s leg, the edge of tables. I have seen him reach up and hook the tips of his fingers into Hamish’s pocket while they are walking next to each other, taking two steps to every one of his father’s. Putting him to bed once, I asked him why he liked having something in his hand. At the time he was holding the strip of flannel he slept with. He said, ‘I don’t like it.’ I asked him why he did it then. ‘So I don’t sink.’ He looked at me nervously, as if I might laugh at him. ‘My mum wouldn’t be able to find me.’ I told him I knew what that felt like, not wanting to sink. He held up the piece of flannel and asked me if I needed it; he would give it to me. ‘I know you would but it’s okay. Thank you. It’s your lovely thing.’ With the flannel still in his hand, he reached up gently, tugged the end of my hair until my face was very close to his and whispered, ‘I actually have two the same.’ If I changed my mind, I could tell him. He rolled onto his side and went to sleep with the fingers of his other hand curled around my thumb.

Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed, mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one. I started a diary on my twenty-first birthday. I thought I was writing, generally, about my life. I still have it; it reads like the diary you are told to keep by your psychiatrist, to record when you are depressed or coming out of a depression or anticipating the onset of one. Which was always. It was the only thing I ever wrote about. But the intervals in between were long enough that I thought of each episode as discrete, with its own particular, circumstantial cause, even if most of the time I struggled to identify it.

I had seen on his face, earlier, at the table, and that was why it was

unbearable: someone conveying love while everyone else laughed at me.

He came over to help me and there with him, kneeling opposite, not saying anything except to tell me that some of the smaller bits were really sharp, Patrick’s sameness seemed to collapse time, until none had passed, nothing had happened and it was just the two of us, picking up bits of bowl.

‘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.’

Peregrine said he would overlook it since sartorial standards were always the first thing to go after heartbreak.

‘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.’

For want of 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.

‘Well, they say London is a city of eight million lonely people, don’t they.’ The man gently tugged the dog back to his side. ‘But this too shall pass. They also say that.’ He nodded goodbye and moved off along the path.

He asked me if I wanted a cup of tea. I said yes and while we were waiting for the water to boil, I told him that I loved him.

‘And this isn’t an impossible decision Martha. This is no decision. Whether or not I want children, I want you more.’

It is hard to look into someone’s eyes. Even when you love them, it is difficult to sustain it, for the sense of being seen through. In some way, found out.

‘So just to confirm. When I asked you, that time, if you were in love with me –’ ‘Utterly,’ he said. ‘I loved you utterly.’

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.

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

She never expressed remorse, later, and our parents did not make her. But, she said, it didn’t matter, she knew we were all still thinking about

it and her shame was so intense it made her angry at us. ‘Instead of like, hating myself.’

He said I needed to speak up, and asked if I was having thoughts about hurting myself. I said no, I said I just wanted to not exist any more and asked if there was something he

could give me that would make me go away, but in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone or make a mess.

I started seeing a psychologist because London wasn’t the problem. Being sad is, like writing a funny food column, something I can do anywhere.

‘Martha,’ he said afterwards, lying next to me. ‘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 is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this any more, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.

‘Mainly, it’s like weather. Even if you see it coming, you can’t do anything about it. It’s going to come either way.’ ‘Brain weather, as it were?’ ‘I suppose. Yes.’

‘You knew he was right. You have known the whole time and you didn’t say anything. Why would you do that to me?’ Both of my legs were trembling then. ‘I didn’t do anything to you. I told you, I didn’t want you to have to go through your life with that terrible label attached to you. If anything, I did it for you.’ ‘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.’ That was when I started crying for the first time since Robert’s office. I put my head down so my hair fell and hid my face but my voice was getting louder and louder. ‘My whole adult life I’ve been trying to work out

what is wrong with me. Why didn’t you tell me? I don’t believe you it was about labels. I don’t believe you.’ A man across the aisle got up and ushered his son and daughter to seats further away. ‘You were perfectly happy for it to be other things. You let me think it was depression and everything else doctors told me. Why not this? Why didn’t you –’

All the way, I thought about my diagnosis. The fact that, in receiving it, the mystery of my existence had been solved. —— had determined the course of my life. It had been looked for and never found, guessed about, never correctly, suspected and disqualified. But it had always existed. It had

informed every decision I had ever made. It made me act the way I did. It was the cause of my crying. When I screamed at Patrick, it put the words in my mouth; when I threw things, it was —— that raised my arm. I’d had no choice. And every time in the last two decades that I’d observed myself and seen a stranger, I had been right. It was never me.

I could not understand, now, how it had been missed. Less and less as I kept walking. It is not uncommon. Its symptoms aren’t hidden. They can’t be disguised by the afflicted person in its throes. It should have ...

I walked on slowly, staring at the faces of people coming towards me, jostling past on both sides, wondering if any of them had burned their own houses down and if they had, how long it was before they could come out and walk around and want things from Accessorize.

‘No actually, I will. Somebody needs to. You think all this has happened to you and only you. That’s what I saw yesterday. It’s your terrible personal tragedy, so you’re the only one who’s allowed to be in pain. ‘But –’ she said, my girl ‘– this has happened to all of us. Do you not see that? Not even yesterday? This is everyone’s tragedy. And if he’d been there, you would have seen it’s most of all Patrick’s. This has been his life every bit as much as it’s been yours.’

Ingrid said yes you can. ‘Even the women who get those things lose them again. Husbands die and children grow up and marry someone you hate and use the law degree you bought them to start an Etsy business. Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want.’

‘all of life on one wall Martha. Every kind of life, real or made up.’

It wasn’t that or, at least, I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick’s goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.