The Aggregate of Happiness

FAMILIES, PT. 2

True, having more cousins makes more parties, but they also increase the amount of tragedy. Who can forget the uncle who died before you were born? The grandfather who perished after jumping out of a plane? Sadness is like arthritis; it is a chronic pain that you must inherit.

IMMIGRANTS

With some immigrant families, depression doesn’t exist. If one has a stable job with healthy kids that get passing grades, or a house with two cars and a backyard and an avocado tree, you are not allowed to be sad. You are not allowed to seek therapy. To those back home, all of those things signify that you’ve made it. What more do you need?

TIME

Some could also say that with four bustling children of various ages who need to be picked up from three different schools from the hour of one to three, there’s no time to be depressed.

FAMILIES, PT. 3

When we were children, my sister, Melissa, used to take the longest naps of the rest of us. While we’d wake up after a few minutes and return to the TV, she’d be the only one left behind in the piles of sheets and pillows. Whenever she awoke, she’d open the door and walk around the house calling, “Mommy? Daddy?” with her hands pawing at her eyes. My dad once said he was in the garage and didn’t hear her; and it was only by luck that he found her wandering down the street, the front door left wide open.

LONELINESS

This is a constant fear of childhood: nobody being there when you wake up.

MICHIGAN

Last summer, Peter died. He was young and the way things added up, happy too. He was in his third year of med school. He had one proud mom and countless friends. They said he came home one day, went down into the basement, turned on the television, and hung himself.

I didn’t know him that well, other than the fact that every summer he would come to California to stay with some of our family friends. This was over ten years ago. I was twelve, my sister was seventeen; and he was a shy, gangly sixteen-year-old. We used to go to the pool together, and he would hang around my sister and not say a word. I think he was her first kiss. But people don’t look the same way they did ten years ago. My sister doesn’t—she’s more beautiful now, less awkward, and even more generous than before. She’s engaged and will be married next summer.

MILL

“A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments, or—in some cases and with interruptions—hours or days. Such an experience is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame.”

A FLASH

It would be unwise, possibly too cruel to bring Peter up, because these days her scale is tipped too far into happy for me to want to shake it so. But if she had the choice to sit in a permanent and steady flame or to experience a brilliant flash of young love again, I wonder which she would choose.

MICHIGAN, PT. 2

I can’t imagine walking through Michigan in the dead of winter; trudging home early on frosty streets, everything colored like frozen grass. I wonder if, when the scales have tipped too far in the direction of melancholy, how much would you have to add up in order to keep going?

CORRELATION

Though my brother is nine years older, we have a lot in common. We have the same taste in music and film, and an all-or-nothing desire to live the way we want. The last is what worries me. I was at the kitchen island making oatmeal when he came in and asked if I heard about Peter. “Do you know if he left a note or anything like that?” “No. It’s kind of selfish, to be honest.” “Cowardly. You at least need to leave a note. If you’re going to do something like that.” We moved around the island for a while, banging around pots and pans. And then, simultaneously, we both said, “Don’t you fucking do it.”

SELF SACRIFICE

Because that is what having a family is. You give birth to your children, you feed them, you clothe them, and you expect nothing but foul words to come out of their mouths during the ages of twelve to eighteen. But that’s not entirely true. For in between the cuss words, they’ll laugh at your jokes one or two times, and maybe ask how you’re doing. And maybe, when you’re old enough for them to clothe you and feed you, you’ll hear them say that you were right. And that they love you. Those words, I imagine, cancel out the rest.

LITTLE THINGS, PT. 3

8) Looking at the mirror and recognizing your parents in the reflection, and after all of these years, you’re not angry about it. 9) Thumbing through a dog-eared book and reading an old lover’s note.

MICHIGAN, PT. 3

A single figure standing on a frozen lake.

CODA

Sometimes I wonder, like everybody else, how I will go: with a bang or quietly in bed, surrounded by friends and family? When people die too young, they say, “Oh, she was a happy child” or “Ah—he was headed for great things.” Let’s forget that she suffered from anxiety; or that his dad was in the Philippines, and he had a stepsister this whole time. I wish there was a space in eulogies where we could acknowledge both the immeasurably happy and the unmistakably sad.

LITTLE THINGS, PT. 4

One time I laughed so hard at the table that a piece of rice came out of my nose. Just one. I sneezed into my hand and there it was. My sister, who was eating her lunch next to me, was already laughing; but when she saw what happened, she laughed even more. She couldn’t stop! It was so funny, and so disgusting, this grain of rice that she started to hiccup and then a grain came out of her nostril too! It happened the same exact way. She swallowed so much air she couldn’t breathe, and then something tickled her nose and she sneezed into her hand and there it was: single, un-chewed, whole. We held them in our hands in awe.

Trisha Federis is a writer and reader living in Oakland, California. She is the co-editor-in-chief of creative writing publication Oatmeal Magazine, and writes about place and memory on her blog, A Worldly Word.