I come from a lineage of women who only believe in god when absolutely necessary and who do not cry; not once have I seen my grandmother run tears down her cheek, nor have I ever witnessed my mother whisper a prayer on a regular Monday afternoon. As my tongue runs out of my mouth to taste the salt that had descended from my eyes—threatening to bear my scars to the world who dares to watch—I wonder how many of them I have disappointed.
I often convince myself that, from the day I came out kicking and wailing from my mother’s womb, my sadness needed to be witnessed. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be real. Maggie Nelson wrote in Bluets, “Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?),” and I’ve never felt more seen by a piece of writing. I think back to all the times I stood hunched over a sink, watching my face be soaked by streams minute after minute, primarily to remind myself to breathe, but also to make sure that I have an alibi. Sometimes the validation is unnecessary; only the alibi matters. But if I’m being honest, I’ve cried more in front of others than I have in my sole company—and I cannot begin to figure out whether that is a good or bad thing. Perhaps one scenario is bad and the other is just worse.
I doubt anyone can match my skill for justifying sadness; for this, I have many: That I am crying on behalf of the women who came before me; that I am being patriotic to the island I was born on and the water that surrounds it; that my birthday falls on the month where autumn rain returns. Yes, I’d rather reach, hands shaking, for these baseless justifications that I have polished and tied up with a bow, than attempt to seek the source of my tears—for this is a process that will only yield more tears, and on and on we shall go. But as time proves to be insubordinate and ticks along without my saying so, I have retrospectively identified some plausible causes to my malady.
Our chief persona non grata is likely my upbringing. I was raised in such a precarious manner where there is a decibel above which if you close the door, then a dark cloud looms over the roof; where there is a manner with which if you set the grocery bags down, then I can safely conclude that there is a high probability you are upset with me; where if there is a punctuating silence at the dinner table where you refuse to meet my eyes, then I really might be better off out of your sight. And I could ask. Inquire about the problem you are grappling with. Because it might very well just be something else, but I will assume it’s me. So I shan’t ask. Asking is equivalent to admitting that I have done something wrong. I have done nothing yet, only stew in my room on the edge of my bed as if I could fall off the edge of this world. And yet, in the quiet pockets of it all, I somehow always manage to find fault within myself and hence on come the waterworks; the way the air that is expelled when you slam the door rushes into my face, the way that the grocery bag tilts towards me when you set it down with a gruff, the way the food goes cold when you don’t look at me—I can’t help but wear the blame like a crown, only in this kingdom, no one is scurrying to plan a coup for it.
Suspect number two seeps its claws into the folds of my brain and I can’t shake it no matter how intricately I try to rewire my gray matter: I am not allowed to feel any other emotion, and sadness appears to be the most acceptable one—or, at least, the easiest one for others to ignore. I used to be angry, like every child who had sustained a burn scar from running around too recklessly. My anger had to go very soon when I grew out of my frilly dresses and started to be seen as a young girl more than a child. Girls are not supposed to be angry, you see, it’s a bad look on them, but befitting for the boys. I also used to be jealous when I saw other kids with newer Disney princess magazines and iPods, but jealousy turns you green and, at the time, green was ranked very low on my list of acceptable colors. The green-eyed monster stayed through my childhood, incessantly ringing the bell; I wouldn’t let him in, but sometimes I’d sit with him, separated by the door, when my parents were with my brother. I was also so afraid of everything. I was afraid of my mother dying (and I still am), of the dark, and of the blue. I was especially afraid when I would be the last to be picked up after school, thinking I had been forgotten. Stories of the bogeyman never scared me because I knew real life offered more threats to cower before. But a girl who stands eternally in the shadow of fear will always be left behind.
And so I’m left with sadness. There’s such a femininity to sadness. I wonder if it’s because of the multiple ‘s’s in the word, each one going out of its way to curve, just like how women go out of their way to make others feel better despite their own emotions. And I think about the times I’ve seen a man cry and how vulnerable that scene is, like a quiet, still painting that I can only observe from afar but not touch—and I think about how it makes me want to cry. While it is easy to sympathise with many emotions, we are not always infected by one enough to mirror it—except for sadness. Anyhow, I’ve ventured too far now. My point is, it was easier for my environment to ignore a crying girl in the corner—“she’ll get over it,”—whereas my anger and jealousy and fear might have ruined someone else’s day.
The third culprit is a pesky little voice swinging its legs from my collarbones, persuading me that while I can write every letter and check up on every friend and family, the same kindness will not boomerang itself back to me—at least not to the same degree. This culprit’s name is irreciprocity. The fundamental flaw of the human design is that we know it is impossible for others to mirror our intentions and morals, but we foist those expectations on them anyway. See me as a wishing fountain, one situated in a humble part of town. My little pool receives coins every other day, laced with wishes and asks for help or necessary responsibilities. And so I oblige. I give and I give. I take the water that I have and I fill someone else’s cup. Then another goblet. Some other bottle. At the end of the day, as my water runs low, no one bothers to donate just a little bit in hopes that it will go a long way; they assume the fountain self-replenishes. So I cry to make the water rise again. And again. And again.
I often think that a person isn’t truly close to me until they’ve witnessed me crying, never mind their acts or lack of comfort. Unfortunately, many who have fit this description are now people who no longer exist in my life, and I can’t help but wonder if there’s some kind of relationship between my tears and their departure. Is it plausible that my inability to extract my cause of sadness—because it frequently tends to be a mixture of sorrows and ballads—confuses them, annoys them, makes them feel as though they do not know me, and hence justifies their footstep out my door? I scream, “I do not know myself either,” as the door slams shut.
Yes, I cry a lot, but that no longer alludes to weakness as I was once raised to believe. Those who see it so are the ones who have been conditioned to fear vulnerability, but how can wearing your heart on your sleeve be so bad if it takes so much courage? Did you really think your stoicism and logic would save you? Did you really think that they were mutually exclusive with emotion?
Actually, if I think about it again—clearly this time, not crying at all—in recent years, the fountain show goes on display when I’m in some kind of confrontation or conversation I didn’t want to have in the first place, believing that bottling in and compartmentalizing my issues is far easier than laying them out bare, having to construct a logical argument, and put up defenses, all at the risk of non-resolution.
I’ll be sitting criss-cross on the side of my bed that borders the wall, struggling to spit the words out of my mouth in some kind of self-muzzling spell. The tears tend to fall before the words do and his facial expression immediately straddles the fine line between “God, not again. Make her stop crying,” in annoyance, and “God, she’s so beautiful when she cries,” in worship. When I finally set free the words into the stale air around us, he fires off without hesitation like a pre-programmed machine. Point, evidence, explanation, link. Set the parameters, ink the definitions, fuel the rebuttals. He contorts his words so I hear him between sobs, only he doesn’t know that my mother and the women before her had taught me not to hear the words of a man as he tries to comfort you, but to watch his face. There is a fire in his eyes. He wants to win.
Through the streams, I take apart his argument and wriggle around the insides for something shrivelled: Half a logical debate, the other half emotionally charged. I can’t say he sounds like my father when he is “communicating” with me, so I cry instead. It always takes me around twelve minutes before I realise he’s not trying to communicate; he’s trying to debate. The tragedy here is that both of us are wired to want to win, but I raised myself to raise white flags when the sirens sound, and the moment I start crying is the moment he wins the argument. The feral witch who resides in some part of my cranium lulls me into believing that he thrives on these wins, so I thought he would have loved me for as long as I cried. I was so far from the truth, but the fountain refuses to run dry.
I refuse to humiliate myself by asking for attention, but my eyes betray me. They yearn so terribly to be seen by some other. So when I cry, make a wish, why don’t you? And if you prove sincere, maybe the women before me will grant it to you as you put your hands around my tear-soaked cheeks and say nothing at all.
I write a lot, and sometimes it’s about someone else; I cry a lot, but it’s always never about anyone else.
The accompanying image serves only as a visual complement to the essay and carries no interpretive or illustrative claim beyond that.
Allison's Archives 
Leave a comment