Reading 2025​

“This is Happiness”

By Niall Williams

          ...Those nights Christy and I resumed our quest for Junior, knowing that he was likely five miles further than the reach of a cycling handicapped by having to stop every so often to slake an onerous thirst. On those night-journeys, he would enquire of my lover's progress, and I'd tell him the none I was making and he'd say That's not good and add breathy bicycle-counsels, most of which were versions of the earlier precis of: Your love is doomed, you must give it everything you've got. That he wasn't adhering to his own advice I let slip for now, the state of in-love granting all its citizens visas of self-centeredness. 

         When I did think of it, I was surprised that Christy was not more downtrodden by the impasse with Annie, and one evening approaching the village of Kilmihil, where Michael the Archangel himself had stopped, and where every man we met was called some version of Michael, I asked him why. He explained himself in a single sentence. 'Noe,' he said, and took a theatrical breath, 'this, is happiness.'

          I gave him back a look you give those a few shillings short of a pound. 'I know,' he said. 'Whenever I said that it used to drive my wife mad.' 'You were married?'

          'I was. She left me for a better man. God bless her,' he said, and nodded down the valley after the memory of her. He smiled, quoting himself: 'This is happiness.'

          It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments in your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. 

          I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.

'This is happiness,' he affirmed once more, pushing off and gasp-pedaling the uphill away from further enquiry.