girlsdontcry's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Crying. I finished my book. I cried more times reading that book than I have cried ... I don't know, at least in the last two years. I'm so out of practice, or rather so unused to the motion, that it hurts. It hurts my throat first, then it hurts my eyes and they screw up so tightly, desperate to squeeze out those tears. I can't make it last though. It's just a few tortured sobs that come out and then it's over. Maybe a big tear will roll down each cheek, a feeling that I savour, waiting until the tears meet eachother under my chin before I wipe them away. Sometimes if one goes close enough to the corner of my mouth, I'll touch my tongue to it, so I can taste its saltiness. I like the feeling afterwards too. The feeling around my eyes, the vague crustiness of it, some solid evidence that I do feel something. These past ... well, I guess nearly two years, I've needed to cry. For me. Not for a dead girl in a novel and for her family. I remember crying before I went to Hong Kong. I'd left my brother's house, my parents were visiting from Australia, and I'd said good bye. I got through it without crying. Which is what I wanted. Until I got to my sister-in-law, who'd not long given birth to her second child. I blamed the hormones she was radiating for me breaking down. But that's not what it is. She always makes me want to cry. She's not like my family, and there is something so beautiful about her. I think she was the only one who knew without me saying how much I didn't want to go and take this "great opportunity" that everyone was telling me it was. And I was ashamed, so I kept apologising to her, but she's not afraid of tears like me, like my family is. They wanted to drive me, but I left their house to walk to the station in the dark, so I could be alone and feel my sadness. It was drizzling, and I cried quietly to myself as I walked. But everything else that came after, the utter loneliness and despair, the sheer boredom of my own company and the feeling that I was close to losing myself. None of that I could cry for. When I came back in June knowing I was going to break up with my boyfriend, I was still stony. Tears came when I said those words out loud, finally. "I think we should break up." But only for a second. Then I pulled myself together and drank some wine, and I never ever cried over it. It wasn't until November, when I sat here in this place I call home, surrounded by a few boxes, a few lonely possessions, the entire contents of my life, on the day I'd finally moved my things from the flat I'd shared with him that I cried. Painful, it was painful again. But it wasn't just my face hurting, or my throat. It was my entire self. I never know why, I can't work it out. I start to analyse as soon as it happens, trying to put a name to it. Maybe so I can make it last for longer, so I can know what "having a good cry" is all about. I'm not one for big conclusions, I wish I could sum things up in the end. But it's not how I see the world. I see chaos and randomness. 9:10 p.m. - 2002-09-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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