Crying

I cried for the first time in a while today. My girlfriend Mica and I were watching a TV show* we’ve been following for a long time. The main character’s goal for the entire show up to this point was to be a published writer, and she’d finally done it, but the manuscript she sold was an autobiographical story about the death of someone she loved. She’d finally gotten what she wanted, through incredible pain, but then she almost decided not to publish the book because it would feel too much like giving up the memory of the one she loved. I didn’t realize I was crying until Mica said something tenderly to me, (telling me it was okay, I think). After that I wiped the tear away and we went on watching the show. For most people getting watery eyes over an emotional TV show episode wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it’s been a long time since I cried, so it stuck on my mind.

I’ve been thinking of crying a lot these days, actually. I’m writing an essay on the short story “Protozoa” by Ellen Martinsen Gorham, which is about an eighth grade girl who, among other things, secretly videochats an older girl she met online for daily crying rituals. It sounds absurd, but it makes a sort of emotional sense. The older girl says that “sharing tears is a high and a release,” and I get it so much that it almost makes me want to give it a try. I was a real crier in elementary school, up until my family’s move to Minnesota in sixth grade, and the things I cried over were so trivial (poor skills at Pillow Polo, hearing a death metal song in a babysitter’s car) that I must have only done it for the endorphins. Because there is a wonderful feeling in crying, especially when it dries up and you realize you’ve crested whatever feeling you were on and things can only get better from here.

After the move to Minnesota I stopped crying quite so much. I grew up a lot around that time, physically at least, and probably felt that it wasn’t appropriate any more. By ninth grade, I think I went the whole school year without crying, which I noted as something of an accomplishment at the time. But it became a problem in midsummer of that year, when I woke up to the news that my eight-year-old cousin Stephen had died. That’s when I should have cried, right? What the hell else was I supposed to do? But I didn’t. When I thought about, I didn’t feel sad, just confused. People didn’t just disappear, certainly not little kids like Stephen. So I lied, pretending to feel some monumental grief when I really just felt blank. Sometimes I worried that someone would figure out it was all an act and expose me for the psychopath I was, not even crying at my own cousin’s death.

I finally cried at the memorial service. We held it at on an island in the Detroit river, a local tourist destination with a water park and ice cream trucks and screaming kids running everywhere. It was the way my uncle said, “I’ll miss you, buddy” as we threw yellow flowers into the river that broke me down. It was just such a simple way to put it: missing someone.

I’ve never trusted crying since then. When the tears cleared, nothing was better, really. Any happy rush that came fled quick. It hadn’t changed anything.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I could cry about a Pillow Polo game in elementary school, cry about a TV show now, but that I took almost a full week to cry over my own dead cousin. It makes me feel selfish, or at least like someone with very skewed priorities. I know that’s not true. I know that there’s no one-to-one correlation between how you feel and what you express. I still mourned Stephen for that week before the memorial, the feeling was just so new that I didn’t know I was doing it. Crying is still useful, though. Maybe we shouldn’t make a self-help cult around it like the characters in “Protozoa,” but it also couldn’t hurt to be a little less ashamed.

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* I won’t say which to avoid spoilers.