You feel in the
depth of you a stirring. You drive in
traffic to work and you feel this thing in spite of the ordinary that is your
morning coffee, the freeway route so familiar and the dulcet tones of the
podcast hosts as they reveal so many aspects of the invisible.
Oil men improving
safety records by 85% by getting in touch with their emotions strikes you as so
unrealistic. Which oil executive would
ever spend corporate dollars on such a program?
Still, the idea of rough men talking about their backgrounds with one
another, opening up and trying to articulate what they felt as the children of
the alcoholic, the impoverished, the dispossessed and so on, was more than
intriguing. America selling the idea of
smiling to Russians via the opening of McDonald’s in Moscow, also touches a
chord. The man who was trained and later
arrives in America to stay appreciates the smile, likes his new ways, but in
the end he comes to see the smile as somehow hollow and this too, resonates
with you. Capitalism forces people to
put up a front all day every day. Customer
Service jobs are emotional labor, which has a dark side. People drink or learn to ignore the
incongruity of smiling or acting 40 or more hours a week.
Your drive is
unremarkable. It is slower at parts and
faster at others. When your podcast ends
you recall listening to Amy Winehouse at 2am on Saturday night with your
closest friends in your living room. You
remember her voice and more, her phrasing.
You remember one of your friends comparing Amy Winehouse to Pat Benatar
and how rude you were in making the point of there being no comparison. He really is so anachronistic for the 70s,
you think. Pat Benetar. Really…
You verbally scolded him knowing full well he simply was not familiar
with Winehouse. But Ms. Winehouse holds
a special place in your heart these days for more reasons than her own tragic
story.
You flip your
phone over to your Youtube app and speak Amy Winehouse’s name and Valerie into
it. You play Valerie and you play it
loud. The song permeates you on this
day. It eviscerates you wholly. You see hear smell and feel your former lover
in the soul of Amy Winehouse’s voice. It
stirs that thing in the pit of your stomach and as you close in on your office,
amidst so many big rig trucks set much higher on the plane of the road, you let
it go. Slowly and softly at first it
gurgles upward. Your body moves from a
strange inertia. You sense the heat
coming to your head. You feel a
congestion forming in your face. Liquid
settles into your eyes. You realize it’s
tears, it’s emotion. You feel the
convulsion of that first major surge and you nearly bark as tears burst forth
as from a dam and roll down your face freely like released prisoners racing to
sustenance.
It feels so fucking
good to cry, you think. And so, you
cry. You look away from cars and
passersby. You wipe your face slyly and
slightly. And you cry. And you miss that girl and you understand she
is not yours and you have to let go. You’re
thankful you knew her though. Not because you needed to know another girl. There have been plenty of relationships over
the years-you’re not sure there is anything more to be learned from intimacy,
at least, Eros intimacy. This cry
though. This cry is life.
Nothing makes you
cry anymore. It feels like an every
couple of years sort of thing and you worry about those poisons you heard were
in tears because of that study some 10 years ago. Why does 10 years ago feel like yesterday?
Surely that study is still valid. Surely
there is poison, physical, chemical, poison, in tears and surely it is good for
the body to rid itself of these toxins and surely that is why this feels so
fucking good. You want to cry for about
a day-and-a-half but you know the feeling won’t last. Already as you think about the fact that this
feeling, this ecstasy of depression, will too pass a new bump of sadness
pulsates through you at the loss of the loss of the loss…
Your profile on
that change management assessment said you struggled with social bonds. You feel social as anything. You love a party. You’re friendly. You’re still a little angry at some of your
best and oldest friends for letting the friendship go like a waterless
lawn. You’re still friends with them but
there is a distance, a void of familiarity and ideas, a gap in dreams and fears
that began in your 20s and like a tarred tree branch never grew back but also
never got diseased. You’re still friends
after all.
What is there to
cry about anyways, you think? If joy and
sadness are opposite sides of the same stone and we can only feel them to the
same degree then the absence of sadness is a sign, right? I mean, what is it you want anyway? Drama?
You’re driving to
work and there is no reason for reasons right now. Tears are falling from your eyes, which are
set on the road as you navigate the Pomona Freeway, like splashes of water from
an overflowing pool. They glide down
your face and you wish you could see them on film. You think your crying is art because you’re
self-absorbed like that perhaps but also because you don’t move otherwise. Your face is as placid as a painting, your
brow in unfurled whatsoever, your body does not jerk or convulse in any visible
way. It drives and your eyes cry and you
feel within you, deep down, a stirring.
You’re sad about this new time, happy about the ability to emote,
relieved at the end of the salty tear drought and withdrawn at your own sense
of alone, of singularity, of one.
