Preface: Three is a prime number.

It wasn’t until my best friends showed me what happiness was that I truly sat up and lived. Everything up until that point had been a miriade of subtle strikes, misses and losses. I had been trained not to recognize happiness as a feeling that stays, rather a passing emotion meant to be destroyed before one got comfortable with it.  There were three of us.  The esoteric angel who had to learn how to use her wings to see the world, the phoenix-minx and me, all trying to make sense of all that is and was and will be. Being a woman, I tend to look too deeply into everything, try to understand it’s core reason, and then evaluate if it makes me happy or sad, like filing papers.  It was at the beginning of this journey when life, giving it and losing it, seemed so black and white, easily filed. It took three of us to see that the true happiness is the spaces between the black holes, not the highs right before the fall into them. It took three of us to learn that trying to be is NOT the same as being. It took three of us to create life, sustain it, and laugh until it hurts.  It is a story of being here, shadow boxing the demons we saw fighting, the frailty in hope and idealism and being strong like a trident through all that breaks around us. We learned how to bend with the changing winds, so we wouldn’t break. We stood together, tested to the brink...