On crying

Today I subbed in a high school chemistry class. Going on 3 hours sleep and stuck in that overly air-conditioned room I was shivering and half asleep the whole time. But I tried to keep myself occupied as the kids watched a video on dinosaurs by continuing my read of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye". As soon as I stepped outside the building at the end of the workday I was shocked by the sun's warm embrace, that moment bearing witness to the foolishness of civilized life.

On my drive home, for no particular reason - not for loneliness, sadness, or remembrance of trauma - I cried like I haven't been able to since last summer in between two portentous phone calls from the guy I was dating. It was that deeply satisfying cry that leaves your mouth hanging open gasping for air and your cheekbones so tense from the continual bursts of tears it feels like they are crouching, poised ready to leap off your face. He first called to say we should break up. I coldly and calmly accepted it and agreed to part ways. I did not love him, nor was I especially committed to continuing to see him, but when we hung up the phone I was overcome by a feeling of utter loneliness in that dark apartment alone having to instantly revise my vision of my future, to edit out from it this person who had volunteered reckless but confident promises to remain in my life indefinitely. By the time he called back half an hour later to take it back - to tell me what a silly thing to do that was, how he had made a huge mistake, and how sorry he was for scaring me - I could barely speak. The crying had started involuntarily and would not stop.

Growing up, crying was so frequent it was almost a hobby of mine, and so it composes the most salient of my childhood and adolescent memories. There was that one time when at 8 years old I was left basically alone in our apartment. My mother and sisters went to the laundromat but I wanted to stay home, imagining all the undisturbed fun that could be had. Actually, I wasn't alone at all, but it felt like I was - my father had fallen into a deep sleep on the couch. When my mother and sisters left, I decided to take out a board game and play by myself. But after a few minutes of sitting there pretending to be two different players and listening to the eerie silence of solitude, interrupted only by my father's soft snoring, I felt a wave of vast and unrelenting emptiness wash over me. I burst into tears, quite literally and audibly, and my father awoke to witness my tears but quickly went back to sleep. This was my first memory of that terrifyingly lonely feeling that was to become all too familiar to me.

It seems like I cried every night for almost a decade, from late childhood to the early college years. Sometimes I cried out of loneliness, like that time in the apartment, and sometimes out of fear. Irrational fears plagued me throughout the day, but at night is when they threatened to swallow me up. I had fears of my grandmother dying before her time, of my parents getting held up at their liquor store, of our house being broken into by dangerous men, of a gas leak exploding the house, of my older sister committing suicide and me finding her hanging in her closet. At the risk of stating the obvious, I was a morbid and excessively fearful child. Maybe I thought the tears would prevent my fears from coming true. I believed in a God then, and I thought surely He wouldn't let me cry myself to sleep in fear every night, only to have my fears come true. Surely He's not that unfair. I was wrong, of course.