nocturnes
When I first moved to upstate New York, my chest pummelled at the sight of a flattened squirrel, the legs of a deer criss-crossed in polarising angles, a raccoon, only identified by its stripes under a pile of blood & gravel. When I failed to swerve enough out of the way for an opossum, a jagged bump confirming my crime, I felt as if I would never breathe again. At the side of the road ahead, I cried into the phone to a man I used to love who said: you’ll get used to it.
Growing up, I was often told I was too sensitive. I cut the hair on the back of my teddy bear’s head in an act of pure devotion, only to completely collapse at his change in demeanour. I fiery-yelled at my peers in middle school for putting the new-ish kid in the bin, and my first ever sleepover away from home ended at 7pm, as my dad’s hand guided my own snotty one back to my own bed, my pyjamas damp from tears. Every birthday, funeral, beginning of Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, TV show finale, sunset, home cooked meal, hand graze, heart-ripping lyric, goodbye, hello, glance across the room, doom scroll, dog sighting, shade of blue, cows outside the car window, friend laugh, eyes watching from a photograph, prods at me like a crack in the sky. I feel as though I’ll erupt if I don’t switch it off sometimes.
Earlier this year I read The Wall by Marlene Haushofer. In it, a woman in her 40s finds that an invisible wall now separates her from the rest of the world. Beyond the wall, all life has been annihilated; a couple sit frozen on a stone bench, their eyes unwavering; an elderly man watering his flowers still holds the can, eventually toppling over in his statuesque form. Her only company is a dog, a cat, a cow and her memories. She fiercely endeavours to protect the creatures in her care, leading her to envision all the horrible things that could potentially happen to them.
“However hard I tried to get away from these ideas I never really succeeded. I don’t think they were fantasies either, since it was far less likely that I could help the animals to survive in the middle of the forest than that they would die. I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theatre and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes. Each of us knew about it, and that’s why we never discussed it. That was the price we paid for our ability to love.”
This pull between paralysis and overwhelm, the joy of being alive with the pain of living glistens like cerulean sinews. I often find myself on both sides of the wall; on the one hand reaching for the freedom of stupefaction, the untethering of emotional lethargy, that beautiful naivety that seems to encompass friends that married their high school sweetheart; on the other, my all-feeling bundles up like a sticky super glue I can’t quite get off the ends of my fingers. Everything I touch is covered in the gauze of cacophony and apprehension.
Last summer, I was asked to write about crying. I went down to one of my local bars, notebook open, and unsurprisingly, had no trouble listing instances of profound grief or heartbreak. Soon the first page was filled with ghosts. A sweet friend was working that night, and intrigued by my buried furrowed brow, he inquired about the project. “Every time I’ve cried, I really needed it,” he offered. “It’s my body’s way of releasing something that shouldn’t be weighing me down anymore.” The statement was followed by a simper, like my friend was grateful for all the times he felt too much, or perhaps, just enough.
Today, catastrophe abounds. We hold tiny, slow-burning catastrophes and huge, unfathomable catastrophes, and most of the time, we can hide them pretty well. They bubble beneath the surface as we make our morning tea, they boil over from the screen we shove in our faces from the moment we wake up, they stab our stomachs out of nowhere. And yet, to appease expectations, or to just get through the day, we bury these catastrophes until they’re just a simmer. Let’s not make a scene now.
As I’ve grown a little older, I’ve had to decide which side of the wall to stand on. Haushofer’s heroine is often lonely, a little anxious and deeply reflective but she is also free; free to roam the fields around her cottage, tend to her animals, and enjoy the last finger-licks of her sugar supply. There is a kind of apricity to her life, in which she embraces what little warmth is offered in the dead of winter. Then there are those frozen on the bench, their mouths twisted into a rictus; never-changing sculptures eroding to a powder.
How devastating it is to feel but how sublime. To taste those granules of sugar, to notice the sun, to belly-laugh at the absurdity of whatever the hell this existence means. With every crack comes change, and movement, and a field with new flowers to discover. I look at the moments of feeling too much, and uncover patterns that slowly bring the world into focus. I see that list of ghosts, of grief and heartbreak, as timestamps of living and my ability to love. I see those figures on the other side.
How lucky I am to persevere in my tears. How lucky I am to hold this burden.
You can read about one of my many instances of tears in Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, out now on Simon & Schuster. The book also features essays from Hanif Abdurraqib, Matt Berninger, Jia Tolentino, Phoebe Bridgers, JP Brammer, Hua Hsu, Eileen Myles and more.