Ready for happiness.

At long last, after many years of longing I think I might just be ready now for happiness. Certain things have passed, other things are no more and this cold, sunny afternoon has distilled into a drop of pure emotion.

A small, empty piazza in Rome comes to mind, with pigeons that lift away on noisy wings from the dusty pavement. I sit down on the bench under a tree. High walls on every side with shuttered windows to keep the heat out of small apartments. No movement of air.

Two tables with a few chairs outside a dark doorway: a café bar. I drag myself over and go through the door and the air is cool, but stale. Cigarettes, fried food, beer. A girl with greasy hair tied back sets a beer on the counter. I pay for it. I drink it and go back outside to the bench beneath the tree.

By now the sun has moved and the piazza is pretty again with the shutters open and girls passing through it going somewhere and I know I'm ready for happiness.

The sky leaks, Brel bleeds and I cry.

It’s a long time since I’ve seen rain leak so heavily from the sky - it makes me feel quite righteous for having wrecked myself cutting the grass last night instead of putting it off until today. Jacques Brel is bleeding mournfully out of the radio in the café and when his words combine with the rain dripping from my hair and with the thin morning light and the heavy smell of coffee grinds in the air, the resulting melancholy rises around me like steam. The rain bounces off the cars and empty pavement outside like Brel’s “perles de pluie”. It washes down the window I’m sitting beside distorting my view of the street, maybe also my view of life, as the poet rhymes “Bonheur” with “Coeur”, “malentendu” with “le temps perdu”. I could cry.

And in walks Annie, drenched, hair stuck to her cheeks and the warmest smile outlined by the reddest lipstick and turning each “perle de pluie” into another extravagant adjective. I’m no longer in Belfast as she smiles at the room and walks past me to the counter; I’m in Paris, café at the bottom of Rue Moufftard, and it’s still raining, the end of December, and she isn’t Annie she’s Maggi, but the lipstick is just as red. She’s wearing the big, creamy, ankle-length coat I bought her to cover up her bump and keep it warm. My heart swells.

Now I’m definitely going to cry. I’ll go outside so that people, if they look at me, might mistake my tears for “perles de pluie”.