My Sisters and Me

(You already know me, but for contrast)

I am contemplative happiness. The kind that aches, waits, and believes things will turn out beautifully if one is patient and emotionally honest. I turns longing into sacrament and sell it by the cartload.

I am the one who writes letters I never send, believes yearning is holy and made a pact with the Upper Planes which immediately complicated theology.

My happiness is deep, quiet and enduring.

Gladness: The Practical One. The Steady One.

Gladness stayed close to home. She runs a busy apothecary and midwifery practice in a market town where everyone knows her name. She married well, not spectacularly, but kindly, and has children, apprentices and neighbours who bring her soup unasked.

Gladness believes happiness is usefulness and shared meals, and that problems can be solved with the right herbs and a firm voice. She is the one people turn to in crisis. She doesn’t write things down. She does things

She is fond of me, slightly baffled and quietly proud. She reads the books eventually, skims the yearning bits, and says things like, “Well, I suppose someone has to feel all that.”

Jubliance: The Loud One. The Wandering One.

Jubilance left early and never really came back. She is a travelling performer, celebrant and holy nuisance; part bard, part festival-priest, part professional guest. She sings at weddings, births, coronations, revolutions. She has been banned from at least one city for “excessive morale.”

Jubilance believes joy is movement, laughter, being seen and seeing others. She lives fast, loves often, and does not stay long once things become solemn.

She adores my books, loudly and without irony, and tells everyone she meets, “That’s my sister. Yes, the angel one.”

United,  it’s chaos and warmth and deeply different philosophies of happiness circling the same fire. Gladness cooks, Jubilance tells stories, I listen.  We argue about, whether love should hurt, whether staying is braver than leaving, whether happiness is found or made.

We agree that happiness is real, it just wears different faces. 

And quietly, cosmically, the Upper Planes have noticed.

Three sisters.

Three expressions of joy.

Only one of them has a celestial patron. And that's me.