With the finger and thumb of my right hand, I unwind the white nylon thread, twisting and releasing it from the brass hook that holds the tension. After 3 or 4 turns, the string unleashes itself and sizzles up, letting the cloth window blind come tumbling down.

It’s just got dark outside.

Autumn daylight’s style is being held back by Winter’s coming nights. And the just descended blinds shield a little of the chill from the old wooden window frames, making our living room just a little bit warmer and cosier than moments before.

It’s an everyday, early evening Autumnal ritual, diligently carried out along the entirety of our bay-windowed street. Families battering down the hatches against the impending evening chill, feeling the warmth inside

As the blind descends, and I help it unfurl itself to the bottom, I stop. As I feel the warmth in the room already rising, I feel peaceful, restful. I stand, statue still for a moment. For just a moment.

And I begin to sob.

I have to hold onto the window frame to steady myself, both arms outstretched. And I sob. It’s been brewing all day, it’s about time it came out. Brought on by this gentle, insignificant moment of warmth and security.

It’s about happiness, you see, and about my momentary glimpses of it. Happiness, like slits of light coming from an old, stubbornly shut window when it’s finally been pushed ajar to let in fresh air.

And so, this is my situation.

As soon as I get even a glimmer of a recognition of that feeling welling up inside me, that buzzy, weird sensation that starts somewhere in my lower abdomen or my intestines  (I was never good at biology, I barely scrapped a CSE pass) or wherever it is inside you that you feel ‘happiness’, as soon as I remember what that sensation is, I start to cry.

And right now, rendered motionless in front of our living window, stood behind the newly dropped blinds, a shadowy silhouette to passers-by, I feel… guilty.

I feel guilty.

As soon as I feel happy, as soon as I get even a glimpse of any kind of well-being washing over me, I immediately feel guilty. Like I shouldn’t. Like I’m not allowed.

It’s then I start to cry.

I’ve no idea if this is normal. Is this normal? I mean, come on, what actually IS normal? Maybe this is just a phase, a single thread in a wider, finely woven pattern? A phase, like in one of those lauded and well-circulated phases of grief, that I still wholeheartedly fail to relate to.

When did this start? Was it always there, from Day 1? Was it just that I didn’t ever feel happiness in the early days, After, to ever know what it was? Is it a step in some well known physiological process I’m not aware of? And if it is, what’s next? Is there a next?

All I know is, right now, when happiness happens upon me…when I find myself looking forward to something, when I laugh and lose myself in a joke, when I feel love, when I feel loved, when I smell dewy morning grass, when I see a crescent moon, when I’m aware of my step on soft ground, when I look in my loved ones’s eyes, when I happen to wake to see the sunrise in the window, when I glance up to see the daylight fading sky… I feel guilty.

It’s a feeling that jars, edges and pushes against this natural rush of happiness. It’s a sinking, aching, hurting sense, that I have no right, no right whatsoever, to be happy. No reason at all, none given, to be taken back to happiness.

As I write all this down, to try to explain, as I look at the words and revise them and reorder them, I know this is all stupid. Predictable. I’m obviously building up to a time when I’ll finally ‘let go’.

When I move to that scene in TV and films where grieving relatives release their loved one’s ashes over rivers and lakes, when a funeral pier burns and drifts into the ocean sunset. I’m supposed to be building up to the time when I get the courage to write my imagined ‘last conversation’ with them both. To when I can finally let them go and move on.

To some readers, it’s an achingly obvious realisation I’m sure.

You can’t grief forever.

You can’t. You’ll move on. Time heals.  It’s the same reaction, heartfelt I’m sure, from anyone who’s ever said to me ‘What would Izzy want?’, ‘What would Beth want?’.

‘Feelings welling up inside, making my soul come alive
And just a memory feels so heavenly, waking up inside of me.
We’ll get on the right track. We’ll get on the right track.

Take me back to happiness.
Take me back to happiness.’

Happiness by Crooked Man (2016)