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This pleases me, as I have always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones. Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.
tears of white women are subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponization has so often meant violence toward people of color, and black people in particular.
Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry or write a poem or fuck someone. All at once? My body has cross-indexed the impulse.
In space tears neither fall nor land.
When I am in the fog of despair I fear I cry too much to be a good partner or parent or person, that something within me is utterly broken, that any reprieve—a day of joy! a poem!—is temporary and somehow false. But that is the fog doing its work, making everything large and grotesque. When the fog lifts I can point up, say Look, it is a cloud.
Empathy can be a hole through which one falls into despair.
Almost all of my understanding is from books.
Sometimes it seems there are more pages in me than breaths. I know how to receive and shape and store these black words, have taken them as instructions.
They say perhaps we cry when language fails, when words can no longer adequately convey our hurt. When my crying is not wordless enough I beat my head with my fists.
It was when fish became terrestrial amphibians that the body’s lacrimal system first evolved.71 We left the water and began to weep the home we’d abandoned.
cyclothymes,
If you have the money for it, you can rent, in Japan, a handsome man to wipe away your tears.92 And you can rent a hotel room designed especially for crying.93 There are days when it feels like happiness is a man I am renting for a fee I can no longer pay.
Friends keep sending me links to Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photography project “The Topography of Tears.”
The body makes three kinds of tears: basal, which are omnipresent and act as a lubricant; irritant, which are produced when the eye needs to be flushed of a foreign substance; and psychogenic, which are produced in expression of emotions.
I wonder whether men kill to create an occasion for the grief they already feel.
psychogenic tearing is always bilateral.
