1-9 Crying and Weird Metaphors

I am, at any given moment, about half an hour from tears.

I can get through my day to day without crying, so long as I am engaged in something.  I can show up to work and not cry on people.  I can buy groceries, greet AirBnB guests, attend class, and function in public without losing my shit.  But as soon as I’m alone, I have about half an hour before the tears start.

I don’t go to bed until I’m exhausted, then I play games on my phone until I can’t keep my eyes open so that I fall asleep in under half an hour.  I listen the podcasts while I bike so that I don’t hit my half hour while riding.  It is very difficult to cry while biking, and right now it is too damn cold for tears.

Driving is the hardest.  I can listen to podcasts, or music, but often that isn’t enough.  And everything in this town is about twenty minutes away, unless there is traffic.  Which is just long enough for me to want to cry, but not long enough to start crying.  Of course, if I go just a bit further, or to someplace that we went together, or if I’m just having a bad day, I cry.  I cry on the way to the chiropractor a lot, I’m not sure why.  That’s an odd one.

This grief feels insurmountable.  It feels like the climbing walls used in military training where you have to run at the wall and launch yourself up until you can grab the top, then muscle over.  Except I keep running at the wall and just slamming into it face first.  It’s like a blooper reel made of tears.

In this metaphor, I have all these people around me cheering me on and trying to help, but the advice makes no sense to me.  It sounds like a crowd of people saying things like, “Do a cartwheel up the wall!” or “Maybe carrying a fish will help!”  I understand those words in isolation, but I can’t make sense of them as they relate to this wall.  I can’t see how those actions will help.

And maybe the crowd is right.  Maybe I need to put a carp in my teeth and do a vault to a roundoff to get the spring momentum to cartwheel vertically up the wall.  But I’ve always sucked at vaults and the whole thing feels impossible from where I am right now.  The wall is still insurmountable.  And now I have fish scales in my teeth.

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