A Stirring

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.