My friends and I have been talking about the importance of crying lately, the usefulness

of tears.

There are times when I go around for days, or even weeks, not knowing exactly what

is wrong, but feeling off.

Or perhaps I know what's wrong, but I cannot name it all without spinning off in the

universe forever never to be found again.

The new surge in the pandemic, the climate crisis, the human cruelty, it's those times

where there is a tightness in my chest that feels foreign and familiar all at once.

What I have learned to do with that feeling, or rather, the only thing that helps me,

is crying.

Even if I can't muster the tears on their own accord, I might have to turn on the sadist

song I know, slowly sing along to waiting around to die by Towns Van Zant, or blue by

Johnny Mitchell, or pain in my heart by Otis Redding.

I can conjure those tears just in time to save myself.

Once I needed to cry so much, I watched the scene in Anne of Green Gables where Matthew

dies and she holds him in the field.

I torture myself to tears because what follows the tears is something like relief.

My chest finally releasing the fist it is nodded itself into and I can breathe again.

Of course there is so much to want to lie down and cry about, the big stuff, the small

stuff, and sometimes in order to find even the smallest amount of healing, I have to let

that all in.

Feel it moving inside me like millions of shards of glass until at last I can stand up.

...