I’d Like to Not Cry Today

Enough already.

I’m laughing at the title — well, not lol, but, like, that smiling-to-myself-in-irony-kind-of-laughing — because I think I wrote a piece on Medium maybe two years ago where I was worrying about how I don’t cry anymore.

I feel like, a while ago, when I was another person, I wrote about how I used to cry — in the car, at a Dar Williams song (“When I Was a Boy”, in case you’re interested), when an old friend told me he’d had a mini-stroke, when I remembered middle or high school-Gabe, when I looked at a flower, or a cloud, or my hands, and about how, more recently, I was concerned that I didn’t cry anymore, even though life has gotten harder, and heavier, and more painful. Maybe I had dried up, turned into a brick or a desk or a thing on a desk.

I remember, more clearly, several years ago, back when I first started writing on Medium because my old college friend, Jerzy Jung, suggested I should, sitting in a cafe — when we used to be able to do that — writing an essay about my first dog, Finley, and how hot tears were jettisoning out of my eyeballs and spraying against the interior of my eyeglass lenses as I remembered his living and his dying.

I think that’s true. I think I wrote something like that —that I-don’t-cry-like-that-anymore essay. I could go back at my archives here and check, but I’m not much of a fact-checker, I tend to just roll with…