Today's Reading

PART I

For, unless we perform, we do not live.

—Serafin (played by Alfred Lunt) to Pedro (played by Alan Reed), in S. N. Behrman's The Pirate, act 1, scene 3

CHAPTER 1

If you could live an entire season of your life in perfect happiness, knowing that once the season ended, you'd remember nothing at all of that time, would you still take the chance?

A question I read in a book called What If, and I remember thinking, Of course I'd take the chance. Who wouldn't choose a season of perfect happiness? And the part about forgetting? I didn't believe it possible to live an entire summer or autumn in perfect happiness and not have those memories be part of you. If sadness can alter the chemicals in one's brain, alter how a woman loves, how she grieves, how she thinks—and I know all too well sadness does do this—then why not happiness?

Why do we assume happiness is benign, that it doesn't leave scars?

I read that archaeologists can determine—from a fragment of bone buried for centuries—a man's age and height, what he typically ate, what his job might have been. I like to believe that happiness, even at the level of bones, marks us similarly. A slight softening, a pale discoloration, and the archaeologist hundreds, even thousands, of years into the future will know: Once upon a time, there was a season, perhaps more, of perfect happiness.

* * *

It's hard to believe I've been living in Wisconsin for over a decade, this state I chose based only on its shape. Shortly before moving here, browsing magazines in the library in the Delaware beach town where I lived, I'd happened upon a map of the United States that depicted the states in pastel colors according to annual rainfall or snowfall or maybe population density. All I noticed was Michigan and Wisconsin, like a pair of child's mittens, pale pink, with their thumbs of land around a Great Lake. Were these the only pink states? The only pink states surrounded by yellow or blue or green, that minty green that for thirteen months was the dominant color of my life?

It was the green of new plants, the green of a fading bruise, and the green of the walls in the hospital that became, when I was twenty-five and twenty- six, the place I felt safest.

A child's pink mittens.

I didn't move to the Midwest right away after seeing the map. I didn't yet understand that I'd have to leave Delaware if I ever wanted to retrieve my life from the place I'd lost it, without ever meaning to, which is how we almost always lose the things that matter most. If I learned anything in the hospital, I learned that sometimes, maybe most of the time, it happens just that quickly: You can lose a part of your life as easily as you can lose an earring or a pair of sunglasses or a mitten. And you don't realize until it's gone.

I'd been living in Wisconsin for six years the summer I met Erik. We met at the Y. I'd noticed him before because I couldn't not notice him. He's so tall, at six foot three tall enough that when standing beside him, I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, which are a beautiful startling blue. Thick dark hair without the gray he has now; a lanky athletic body. When we saw each other, we'd nod in recognition, but that was it. I liked him for this. I didn't go to the Y to flirt or make friends. I went because I needed to, especially that summer, ten years since the accident. Exercise and work were the only things keeping the glacier-like depression from advancing once more across the surface of my life. Still, I did notice Erik wasn't wearing a wedding ring; later, he confessed he'd noticed the same thing about me.

By August, I was in the gym sometimes twice a day, and it was on one of those days when I saw Erik was also in for the second time. "Uh-oh," he said. We were both leaving, walking across the lobby. "You too?"

"Me too what?" I laughed.

"Twice in one day." He shifted his gym bag on his shoulder. "It's never a good sign."

He was right, and I wondered what in his life was troubling him. He seemed like one of those guys at ease with himself and at ease in the world. But isn't this what we often imagine? Everyone else is doing okay, we think. They look good, they're functioning, and we forget: We are too.
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