I’ve come to believe that there is no fracturing happiness. Moments of tragedy aren’t a collection of fissures that shatter an unbroken plane of contentment. If happiness is a line, it’s a crooked one. It bends and warps around knots and nicks in the surface of our lives. It doesn’t end, it’s never disrupted, only redirected. A comet came and it killed the dinosaurs. But it made way for a new kind of life to come into being. What was, on the surface, a mass extinction event was the orchestrator of our existence. The worst thing to happen up until that point? Perhaps. But it was a pivot that opened up a door that had to be punched through the fabric of the universe. There has never been a loss or a catastrophic event that was little more than a course correction. There has never been a trauma that hasn’t borne a better world for me. 

And so my happiness has never shattered. It’s never dissipated, it’s never gone away. It’s metamorphosed. It’s found it’s home in the aftermath of all of my mass extinction events. One unbroken line that bends around the meteor craters that pockmark my existence. Cataclysmic things will mark us all with the unique burns and scars that only they can bring, but there is always life on the other side. We could never get to it without punching a hole through what we have now.