Dance with the horses through the sands of time

2003-10-09 - 12:41 p.m.

I don't know what's the matter with me this morning. I'm just sitting here crying for no reason. Oh, wait, look, it's not even morning anymore and I didn't notice. I'm still in my PJ's.

I'm listening to my brother sing. When he was in college he was in an a capella group. They made a CD of one of their performances and I'm listening to the mp3 files I ripped from it. It's sort of funny, in this one song the lead singer forgets the words in one of the verses, but they manage to pull it off without sounding too horrible.

This crying thing started last night, I think. Or maybe earlier. I think it may have been tipped off by the book I just finished reading. I was reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and it was just so sad. It's about a young girl who was murdered and how it affected her family. I cried during almost every chapter. And the tears felt burningly good on my sore eye.

I started thinking about sitting there in the optometrist's office looking through the big machine thing out towards rows of letters projected on a wall hearing her telling me to let her know when I can tell that there are letters there as she flipped through lenses of varying strengths. Thinking about how I just wanted to say that I could see them to be spared the pain of not seeing them. How can this not be fixable? Everything is fixable.

And I layed there in bed and cried, not that I was particularly sad. Not that I don't still believe it will be fixable, in the end. Not that I can't still see well enough to be functional, anyway.

And I started thinking about Ali and wondering if she was laying in her bed in the wee small hours somewhere in the nearby unknown crying herself to sleep, too. And I wondered how many people in my neighborhood were crying themselves to sleep right then. How many people in the world were crying? How many of them were crying for no reason, like me?

And I remembered how I used to cry myself to sleep almost every night. Starting from early in high school lasting until midway through my first year of pharmacy school. And then I stopped crying every night. I became a somewhat successful and somewhat normal person. I wanted to tell Ali that it gets better. You can cry yourself to sleep every night for no reason and still turn out ok. If you think I've turned out ok. If I've turned out at all.

I'm still in my parents' home. I started thinking about how I get along much better with my parents when they are together. As though they act as buffers against each other for me. I don't like being here with my dad without my mom. He says things that hurt me without realizing they hurt me. And I don't give him any hint that they hurt me. I just smile. But how could he not know? How could it not be common sense that these things would hurt me? And it's the same things he used to tell me when I was growing up. Is that why I'm falling back into my crying at night habit? Can I blame it on him?

He tells me how stupid I am. I don't disagree. I'm a brainless idiot, but it's not something I enjoy hearing. I've always been the useless lump daughter. And recently he's been telling me how fat and lazy I am. It's all true, but sometimes it would be nice to hear good things. To at least hear that someone believes in me, even if it's not true.

And I was thinking about the way my mom raised me just to be different from the way my grandmother raised her. When my mom was growing up she always had to behave like a lady and look beautiful. Looking at my mom's old class pictures I could always pick her out by looking for the prettiest girl in class. My mom thought she should've been given more freedom growing up. She thought she wouldn't force me to be girly the way she had been forced. I revelled in it. I was a tomboy, refusing to wear dresses or anything with flowers on it. Refusing to do my hair or wear make-up. But what did that get me? Now I can't act girly to save my life. All I can do is pull off a poor imitation.

And then, as the hot tears continued to burn in my sore eye, I drifted off to sleep.