two for joy

“so you’re like, a really happy person.”

The magpie who visits my kitchen window most days feels like a test. Ritually, I salute him, as my mother would, to fend off the omen. Safe for another day. Still, the next morning he’ll be back despite the cold, his footprints trying to permeate the frost, melancholy in a bundle of feathers and a quick-beating heart. I implore him to bring a friend next time. For both of our sakes. One for sorrow. I wonder whether he’s named so for his aloneness, or alone for what he’s come to signify.

When someone tells you that you ‘seem like a happy person’ and they mean it as an insult, you learn everything you need to know about them, even if it still stings. It’s sycophantic, really. What they mean is that you lack depth. You lack insight into the reality of things, and if you weren’t so naïve, you couldn’t possibly be this happy. You can scramble for a specimen of the hardships you’ve known, if you like, let it spill over like paint displaced by a brush plunged into a tin, but the damage is already done. That’s fine, though. Your depth is for you, not for pouring out over the floorboards in this bar where everyone’s too familiar with you. Not for proving points in the early spring sun that used to bleach your old bedroom. It’s still there even if you’re not harvesting it for your confessional. It might even constitute art if you try, desperately, misguidedly, to look at it that way.

It doesn’t all look the same, I want to say. Happiness, that is. That’s what makes it daunting, because you never can be quite sure if it’s there, not really. Every time I read about love or fulfillment or peace and don’t see my own exact shape mirrored in the curves of the description’s continuous edge, I’m filled with panic. It’s remarkably easy to find myself shaken on the things I’ve grown from my own core.

Genuine happiness that’s set into your bones shines through almost imperceptibly- as far as being noticed by others goes, at least. It’s the obvious change you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s not, importantly, the absence of sadness. In the same way that colour is not the absence of black, it’s tempered by it. Happiness isn’t the opposite of anything, in the end. Not of repression, or gloom. They can be its antidotes, if you time them just right. But never quite as mutually exclusive as they’d hope to be.

When you carve the things that hurt into the page it feels like catharsis. They make more sense within the infinacy of words. You can do the same with love. With joy. That blistering, splintering happiness that threatens to undo you. I feel so much that I can’t find anywhere to put it and I fear it’ll dissolve me like acid, or else go to waste. I don’t know which would be preferable. Maybe, too, the pleasant lull that taps away at you like droplets of water on a stone, until it’s been long enough that they’ve left a valley. But the words all come out sounding much too serious, and seriousness is for sad feelings. Sad people. You can pick which words you use, but you can’t choose whether people read you as sad (intelligent) or happy (less so). You can say you’re so content it renders everything painful that came before it worthwhile, and if you’re careful enough with your words, you’ll still sound sad.

There’s a man in the corner of the pub with a guitar, to whom no one’s paying any mind. I get the impression he likes it like that. He’s singing in a way that makes me half expect his greying heart to sob its way out of his bare chest and neatly, softly, flood onto the cider coated floor. I picture a mouse of a bloody little heart with its own two tiny arms, reaching out for comfort like an infant. Crawling towards me, hands outstretched. I want to cradle it.

We’re all of us making mistakes in these smoke-soaked walls tonight, except it’s not young and fun and sexy. It’s the end of the world. It’s three sides of A4 apology, it’s sleepless nights, it creeps in when you don’t have anything else to feel bad about.

Outside the station, I sidestep a pile of sugar, dissolving in the rain. Its sweetness licks at the gutter. I look up for its source and see an empty market stall, under the cover of which a fur-wrapped woman is smoking a cigarette. Burnt to barely halfway down its body, she puts it out in the water cascading down from the canopy overhead. Holding it under the deluge for longer than she needs to, twisting it around with a spaced gaze, then dropping it on the ground, where it smoulders in the wake of the watered down sugar. The memory of her image comes to me as I press my face against the pole of the tube, because its coolness feels good. Some of the sugar is recrystallising on my boot, down here in the heat. Reforming itself and stickying the floor. It won’t leave footprints. Like it was never there.

I am a selfish person in that, like many people, I am driven by my own pleasure to an extreme length, even if it comes at the expense of my contentment. Hardly Freudian in the end- or, if that pleasure principle is designed to avoid negative feelings, mine may have been offline. I think back to laughing with my head out of the window and wince at the hair’s breadth between my skull and the lampposts that screamed past. Recklessness is only identifiable because there are consequences, it’s when you truly don’t believe there will be any that you’re really in trouble. The difference between fun and something more twisted than that is whether or not you act like you have something to lose, I tell myself.

I’m not a reckless person, because I couldn’t escape for a moment the pulse that reminds me I have people waiting to know that I get home safe. I have people willing me to be tucked up in a blanket in the dark hours, fed with something colourful and sustaining and good, held by someone else when it can’t be them, a circle of gentle hands. I have people aching to know that I allow joy into my life- l cram it in with all the strength I can muster. So I honour them. And I let sleeping dogs lie.

Sometimes recklessness doesn’t look like a car you couldn’t describe if your life depended on it, racing down a street whose cardinal direction (relative to home) you can’t conjure. Sometimes it looks like having such a tight grip on your puppet strings that there’s no room for them to move. Confined to the white knuckles of your own fist and no further, but at least you’re the only one who gets to decide where your limbs dance themselves.

You narrow the spectrum of what you can experience only ever at your own expense. I remember the sinking feeling one teenaged new year when I realised there was nothing more I could deprive myself of. There wasn’t a higher level, another supposed toxin to cut out or slate to clean. There was no morning earlier than the one I met every day. No repentance left. It was checkmate. The emptiness of acknowledging that this was as much control as I could get isn’t something I was proud of. Instead, it became something I chose to flee from.

When someone tells you that you’re ‘a happy person’ and you take it as an insult, something irrevocable is uncovered. A gleaming mirror. It’s shameful, really, that all anyone has wanted is for you to be happy, and when someone deems that you’ve succeeded, you take offence. You tunnel inwards to assess the statement, as if whether it’s true or not has anything to do with you. Is it because you’re worried they’re right? Is it because of the insinuation that hangs in the air after the words are spoken, lingering between you like someone else’s perfume. The aspersion that you don’t deserve it?

People have been theorising on happiness as long as they’ve been feeling it, which is to say forever. The condition of modern man is too preoccupied with seeking it, says Marcuse, and we ought to repress ourselves a little. For the sake of cohabitation. Furedi says we’re narcissists who care too much about not seeming unhappy, that we might forsake our real happiness along the way. These are based upon the affect theory, that we infer how happy we must be based upon how we feel. That the two are separate. That happiness is something that lives inside of us, with symptoms we have to learn to measure, like a language. It’s typically assumed that happiness is a force outside of our control, for us to decode. A happening, rather than an outcome.

In 2005, a group of researchers led by Sonja Lyubomirsky concluded that we have a natural set-point, a vague level of happiness we’ll return to no matter how far you bend or stretch us. You can do things to shift that set-point if you’re diligent enough, and if you care to do so. The researchers claimed that it’s 50% genetic, by the way. So there’s that.

And sure, there are receptors in our brain we can measure. Neurochemicals that fit the description, shot between our connections. If you’re really quiet you can hear them humming through you. All inside of you, but activated by touch, talk, green grass and blue sky. Open air that stretches further than you’ve felt in a while, bright lights above that make a doe of you when you look at them.

Imperatively, these things are fleeting. They burn a second, and fizzle out. You go a lifetime thinking you’re chasing the moment they catch fire, but it’s the dying embers you really want. The slow descent where you get to reflect, where you remember what it’s like without oxytocin coursing through your veins. Nice while it lasted. Until next time.

Having run through every iteration of reminiscence, every one of our shared stories that’ve been told so many times the pages are well thumbed, we’re picking our way across the rocks, and talking about decompression sickness. Toying with the idea like a ghost story, on this icy night, on this pebble beach that’s already the site of too many memories. When deep-sea divers reach the surface, the pressure sometimes eases too quickly, and bubbles form in the tissue of their body. Nicknamed the bends for the way it makes you double over in pain. It can kill you, if it’s bad enough. I ask if we can change the subject to something less morbid. No one pays any attention.

I’m shivering beneath the inkspill sky but it rewards us: the milky way unfurls above me, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The longer I look, the more stars seem to appear, burning through the close black.

‘Shooting star,’ I say, to no response. My arm stretched up, reaching away from the cold rock. Pointing. Whatever it was, dust or rock sizzling upon entry to our atmosphere, it didn’t know I was watching, and would have burned regardless. But it knocks the air out of my lungs nonetheless. More flashes of light stream through the sky, so short-lived I find myself doubting I ever saw them. Pinpricks of white screaming past, an immeasurable distance away. I unclench my jaw for the hundredth time today and let my bones settle onto the pebbles, the cold pushing its way through my clothes.

In the morning, the magpie returns, bringing with him a mirror image. A second bird, hopping over the moss. One for sorrow, two for joy. I salute them both, and wonder what’s so shiny about our home that they keep returning. I only ever see it from the inside, really. I watch as the pair jump around in one another’s company for a while, before flying away, almost in sync. I try to pay close enough attention to which one stays for longer, which flies first, sorrow or joy. But they twirled around so much that I think I’m confusing one for another, and so I let them leave without another thought.

---

thank you for reading. if you enjoyed this and want to support me to be able to keep writing, you can buy me a coffee here :)