How can you think of melancholy as only weakness, as only the stain in a row of perfect windows radiating cathedral light? Whoever invented beauty understood: what moves and lifts us beyond ourselves, shows us too that vaster space whose edge, whenever we've tried to approach it, seduces through apparitions. And so, where we imagined the place we'd fall through space, we inked monsters: sea pigs and leviathans, sirens, pythons in whose gristled mouths whole basins of stars could drown. We don't pull sadness out of the air; its molecules live there alongside the brighter atoms of expected happiness— Isn't that the way bodies learn to adapt? Never absorbing more light than they can use, treasuring what glows even as it disappears.