Why I cry…

I cried in my poetry class today. I didn’t even leave the class or excuse myself. I just let the few tears that were already formed in my throat flow right out and carefully wiped them away making sure my makeup remained intact. I still had another class to teach and had to go meet a friend later.

These tears were the remnants of the emotional response from the bad romance that I have been grappling with for the past four years. The person called me in the middle of the class, and I was so eager to finish that moment that I took the call. I got my closure. But I had overestimated my over-it-ness, as you do, and the tears still came, unstoppable and quite adamant in their arrival. So I cried them. And they went away just as moodily as they had come. I am going to think that the people who noticed me dabbing my cheeks and sniffing, while studiedly avoiding eye-contact with anyone but still giving out instructions for the activity, assumed that the poetry or the piano playing in class had moved me. It’s quite OK. Some others were more wonderful and asked me after the class and I told them, and that was just as fine. Tears to me are not embarrassing. Tears are nice.

The other day I was listening to Chandelier by Sia, my secret guilty pleasure song because I imagine myself dancing some modern interpretive dance to that song and wowing everyone in my family (it will never ever happen because I cannot dance). She sings ‘Feel my tears as they dry…’ and it struck me then, after having listened to it many many times before, that the sensation of tears drying on my cheek is a specific one, and a familiar one at that. It’s beautiful that she wrote it out because I hadn’t registered it till then. Thank you, Sia.

And that day, I thought I should tell you why I cry. Because I cry a lot. Or at least, a lot more than your average person, woman or man. I like crying almost as much as I like not crying. You thought I was going to say food, but I don’t like crying that much. I have always noticed that I was the first one to cry in any given setting or situation. If there was anger, I cried to diffuse it. If there was sadness, I cried to disseminate it. If there was hope, I cried at the prospect of it. If there was death, I cried because of the paucity of hope.

Over time, though, people have made me feel badly about crying. Not all the people, and not too much at that. Mostly, I have kept my tears to myself and mostly, people have expressed surprise or disbelief at my free and unfettered display of emotion. A curious reaction I have always got from the rare onlooker to my teary indulgence is that they can’t believe that I cry. Like, at all. I always get the same justification to this assessment — I seem too strong. All I will say is, emphasis on the word ‘seem’. I’m strong, sure, but my strength is in my sentimental acuity. I embrace my feelings and they give me capacity to hold my own.

I remember crying for days on end after finishing a great, big novel about a woman losing faith in love and working toward finding it again, Tara Road by the eternally wonderful Maeve Binchy. I was, at the time, in love with the same person who very recently got to affect me again (and that’s lightning striking twice, and smiting worse than the last time, now that I think about it) and the whorl of emotions resuscitated by Binchy’s storytelling brought about an extra dose of the waterworks, and I was swept. I remember thinking how cathartic it was to cry about a book and find solace for a real heartbreak by imagining sorrow for a fictional one.

When I lost my grandfather’s brother (we were close), then my only aunt, then my grandfather, then my grandmother, then my maternal grandfather, and then my own father (today is his birthday, and maybe that’s also why I have been weeping since morning without understanding the catalyst), I began a more ardent relationship with crying. All these deaths happened within a short span of time, and while I lost the rudders to my boat, I also lost my friends whom I had amassed in the hopes that they would keep me afloat. They fled. I sank. I sank in my tears and I was comfortable. I was very comfortable. For months on end, I was unable to function normally, and one of my favourite things to do was to look out of the train window, think of nothing, and break down. It got to a point where I would have to alight from the train en route and just cry for a while. Eventually, I got on medication and that helped subside the weeping. I still cry thinking of those days however. They were very pure in their sadness and there is nothing I would change about that.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost a really special foster kitten who had come to me on Christmas. I took her out to bury her and even as I tried to bring her back, I had streams of tears blinding me, making me heave and ultimately, dig very badly. Just a few days before that, Beanie, my other foster from the same lot who had perished from a deeply infected wound and abscess gone very bad, had brought out a similar response.

I think, I admit, that when I was coming home from the vet’s clinic, I was half-crying because I had let my tiny furry friend down (guilt is a strong factor when I foster, although I try to not let it be so) and the other half of my teary-eyed walk back was from relief that I didn’t have to watch him suffer any more. I had, at that one time during the new year week, four foster kittens, and three were severely injured. One was paralysed and unable to even poop or pee without my assistance, one had a wounded leg that was infected, a broken tail and a cut mouth and the third was Beanie, whose wound was so badly festered that the doc couldn’t even suture it shut. It was rotting him from the inside and we couldn’t find any veins alive enough to give IV drugs to keep him running. It was a losing battle when it started, and I lost a little more every day. With Tinsel and Teenie also demanding my time and attention, I felt like Beanie was either not getting the right attention or getting the attention that was better spent on the more promising of his litter mates. I feel horrible saying this even now, but fostering is not easy and that’s that.

So, that day, on my short walk back home, I stopped at an iron gate that’s always shut, sat down on the cement skirting next to it, shielded from the world by bushes and hedges, and I cried loudly as Beanie rested his final rest in a big paper bag near my leg and too, as strangers walked past concluding various wrong assumptions about my state.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I am now able to identify my relationship with tears as special, personal and very intimate. I like my tears and I welcome them whenever they come. I know they heal me and if I don’t understand their method to this madness, that’s okay. I appreciate that knot in my throat as it surreptitiously announces the oncoming splash. I enjoy the feeling of my eyelashes bunching together to protect my cheeks from too much rain. I love the emptiness I sense at the base of my stomach after crying my heart out. I respect my ability to engage my emotional self with my rational side and find the cause and triggers for why I cry even as I cry. And I acknowledge in full this trait of mine, knowing that not everyone will understand it and even fewer will tolerate it but accepting that this habit, this peculiar manner in which my emotions find meaning, makes me an essentially pure version of who I am. And so, I cry.