The Joy Box

 

16 June 2022

I keep my joy in a small terrarium in the corner by the window. Its glass keeps all suffering outside. I trade knowledge of my joy for the inability to enter into the box. My shadow digresses between it and what lies outside.

My joy feels itself set apart from the complicated ethics of this moment, the testimonies from such a complicated source. Clear water, a sign that warns of lepto from cattle upstream. Inside the box, the water is pure. There’s no equation for it there.

I have to remember to look at the box, to imagine its roof raised, the smell of its loam a balm, the shape of joy a seedling leaning into light. Even in the dark, the shape holds firm. No words pass between my joy and me. 

The box’s humid roof melts paper, but only after headlines have outlived their usefulness. It turns to art inside the box, as if I were Cornell and my trinkets were better arranged.

As a child, he wrote a world history from A to E. The archives were known to hide seeds and dusty butterfly wings. Something fertile between files detailing criminal acts. His archive a box, the box he carried across the room, papers spilling off like one-winged doves.

I started a novel one summer, only later seeing how object became symbol, how my fictions failed. It made me blush, though only I had the key. That wasn't a form of joy, but of ambivalence. I remember telling my friend that that was my central emotion. We talked again yesterday, decades folded between our fingers like dog hair stuck to a cushion. The dog knows about my joy; yesterday she nestled against a friend riven by grief. Friend smiled.

Neither is that joy, that slight updraft from grieving, the stairway a prop for heart and back. But I look at her now through the window. When we touch eyes, we make seratonin between us. Eat the rainbow, a shopping bag hanging from a nail in an abandoned house reads. Its colors dissolve on contact, or what we take to be the touch of eye to horizon.

First, they told lies to themselves and to us. Now truth, punctuated with laughter or irony’s other sounds. I turn from the television to my terrarium, releasing a conspiracy into its box of warm air. The murmuration of the mob fades into clock tick and faint hammering. We look at one another like child and fish, or like sun and wooden floor through window. Remember to take pain in with your breath, then let it out again as joy.