tear girl

I collect my tears in mason jars akin to those that catch the leaks of rain from my window sill. The jars sit next to each other and only I can tell them apart. One is filled with the cries of my own creation, the other with the cries of the sky above me, and neither of us have found a way to make it stop. 

It’s a night like any other. I’m waiting on my bed by the phone for you to indicate that you still care about me, provide me some kind of relief from the incessant aching in my chest, but my screen remains empty. Why do I determine my own worth based on the attention you give me? Why can’t I ever be enough for myself? 

I stretch forward, arms to ankles, and attempt to release some tension in my back, but it holds taut underneath my skin. I rest my head down, still stretching, and criticize myself for not being as flexible as I used to be. 

She used to be a dancer. 

Are you sure? 

Just as I’m starting to inch my hand toward the bottoms of my feet, I feel the tiniest pricks of wetness hit the exposed skin on the back of my neck. I try to ignore it, but the moisture grows until my shirt is soaked through and the sheets around me start dampening. Sitting up, I turn around and see her. 

She looks exactly like me. Her hair goes past her shoulders and has framing chunks that curtain her face, a stubborn reminder that growing out bangs is as big of a commitment as having them. Her nose is small and straight with just the slightest hint of a downward turn. Her lips are heart-shaped, but cracked. Her eyes are shining honey, but surrounded by deep bags that rest incongruently on high cheekbones. She even has the same patches of discoloration that I do on my neck. I wonder if her patches travel down the trunk of her body too, if she’s ever spent hours putting foundation over them like I have, or if she has learned to like them like I haven’t.

She looks like me, but not as exact as I thought. She’s thinner than me, much thinner, as thin as I was when I really despised myself. And her eyes, even though they look like mine, don’t act like mine at all. When she moves her head, the color ricochets around the whites like a trapped marble. It is for this reason that I can’t tell if she can even see me. I reach a hand out to grasp her own, but there’s nothing solid for me to hold. My hand goes straight through hers and is entirely drenched. 

At this moment, she throws her head back and laughs rabidly with uncharted abandon. In her laugh I hear the clash of windchimes braving the tempest. In her laugh I hear the hyacinths wilt with the individual popping of each bulb off a weak stem. In her laugh I hear chaos, I hear home. 

Her knees and elbows are bandaged, as if it’s clear she cannot move without destroying something, be it others or herself. She snaps her head back to look at me, and for the first time since seeing her, her eyes are pointedly locked on mine, no longer scurrying about. With one small breath she whispers. 

I am entirely you, but entirely not you at all. You made me. 

And points to the jar of tears. 

Words escape me, as they often do, in the presence of strangers. Sometimes even in the presence of the ones I love the most I can’t bring myself to speak. The thoughts are choked out by barbed wire laced across my tonsils distorting any sentiments I could express into meek one word replies. Aw. Yeah. Cute. Seriously. Nothing to offend. Nothing of note. All so fucking safe it makes me sick. Why can I never speak my mind even though my thoughts are often shouting from the mountaintops of my consciousness? When did I learn to be so afraid of everything? 

I think the other me knows this already, and she waits patiently for a reply. She keeps slowly nodding her head at me, letting me know that it’s safe to speak, so do it already, say something important, say something they’ll all remember.

But all I can do is apologize. I’m sorry. 

The only thing worse than being awkward and painfully shy around strangers is acting that way in front of the ones you love. It makes you feel dirty, a fraudulent spirit rises and dies inside of me every time. I’m like that with you. I yearn and I dream and I long to be with you, and then the moment that we are together my voice is gone again. The only thing I fear more than being unable to truly express myself around you is the idea that you will like this false front more than you ever would like the real me. Everything you like about me is everything I hate about myself. All the coyness, all the stammering, and blushing and making myself small. I fear you can’t love me when you don’t even know me at all. It’s a trap that I can only blame myself for. 

She takes her middle finger and points up the bottom of her nose making herself look pig-faced, an animal of her own design. She holds this pose and talks through shallow nasally breaths. 

If I can make a fool of myself and remain confident that you’ll still listen, then why can’t you do the same. Speak to me. You owe me this. Speak. 

Embarrassment grips and flutters around my ribcage, latching onto my bones and holding me in an anxious flux of being. Just be brave. So I speak back. 

I’m sorry that I made you, not sorry that you exist. 

It’s not much, but it’s a start. 

There’s a passage from TS Eliot’s The Waste land that has imprinted upon my heart. It goes like this. 

“‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 

“‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. 

“‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 

“‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’”

The first time I heard this I was shocked. I was laying in my bed, trying not to breathe too loud as the phone was right by my lips, and I didn’t want to disturb your reading. My blanket was missing a duvet cover, and any amount of fidgeting would lead to the express dance of feathers bursting from fragile seams, so I laid still, tried to breathe quiet, tried to listen. 

I hadn’t seen you in two years. Still, you called me and you read to me. We do this sometimes in the tiny hours of the morning when there’s nobody else to talk to. I know that if there was somebody else you would talk to them instead, but only the pathetic are that desperate. I am the pathetic. The tiny. 

I was shocked because I had never had my feelings framed out so beautifully before. I could feel my tongue swell up in my mouth as the sentiment was actualized and I prayed silently that this was the result of finding solace in my loneliness, and not the result of my allergy to downy feathers. 

I read those lines to the girl, but not with the same lullabye tone that you read them to me. My words come out awkward and unpracticed. An inflexible dancer attempting her oversplits. A cello recital with no prior lessons. A dog walking on hind legs for the first time. Uncanny. 

She listens, nodding still, nodding always. And then, 

I remember this story too, you know. I remember every time you’ve cried. It feeds me. So yes, perhaps I did cry after reading The Waste Land. Even if I don’t fully understand it yet. Even if my literacy in biblical references is as diminished as my sense of faith. It still moved me. 

Of course I didn’t cry in front of you. I waited until you got off the phone, and I looked the poem up myself and I read it through twice and then came back to that one passage to ruminate on it until my bottom lashes were clumped with tears. It happens. 

Feeling brave, I look at this twisted version of me once more. She’s sitting with her legs stretched up in the air and her elbows calmly resting on the bed below her. Topsy-turvy. Looking

closely at her skin, it all becomes clear to me. Every little cell of hers is directly a tear from my past. Her thighs comprise all my previous sobs of unwanted touch. Her arms are made up of my teardrops from all the times I failed to fight back, to defend myself, to do anything. My cries in her face are poignant and if I slow my breathing just right I can hear the faint moans and painful sighs from crying sessions past. She’s made up of so much misery, yet she still smiles back at me. She’s too expressive. Too much life in something so otherwise calling to be dead. It’s what she wants right? To die? Is it? How could it be any other way? 

So I make a plan. I’m a Capricorn after all, it’s what we do. 

I invite her to spend the night in bed with me, here in physical form, not just as my cursed jar of tears. For my plan to work, I have to fool her in the ways others have fooled me. I sell her the world. All the Valentine affections, all the Christmas cheer, every good tiding and express concern for her dreams. I butter her up until she melts beside me, vulnerable. I tell her that I care, but it’s a lie. Nobody ever cares about anyone but themselves, and it’s delusional to think otherwise. 

She keeps emphasizing that we are the same, but we are not. She said so earlier that she was entirely not me at all. 

And once I kill her then perhaps I’ll be free. 

She’s sleeping. The frizz of her hair lays sprawled out in every way, including some strands wrapped perfectly around her neck. Her bruised appendages are at rest for once, no longer fidgeting, but healing. The animal is dreaming. She almost looks pretty. 

I grab my pillow and smother her. It’s much harder than I expected as she soaks straight through it and lunges for my neck with her own watery hands. We tussle and tear and torment each other until we’ve both landed off the bed onto the floor in a heap of rage and betrayal. She looks at me, standing up, and spits on the ground beside me. 

You harm as much as you hurt. 

And with that final song, she grabs the mason jar off my window sill and leaves.

When you call me later that night, it feels the same as any other night. I’m left wanting so much more, I want your love to drown me, and yet I stand in a dehydrated pool. I’m ashamed about earlier, and desperate, so desperate for you to say you love me back that I attempt to force your hand. 

“Do you even like me?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Do you have feelings for me?” 

“Well…” 

You tell me you love me as a friend. 

I think I missed the class that taught boundaries. Our friendship is months of sexting, you asking for pictures of my ass to cum to, you calling me beautiful, you staying up with me every night, reading to me. I thought you read to me to express some hidden puncture in your heart akin to mine, one that bled while we were apart, but I know now that you just liked the sound of your own voice. 

You tell me you love me as a friend and my heart is breaking it hurts it hurts it hurts but no tears come. My chest heaves, my cheeks sting, but no tears. And this lack of crying, the ease with which I take the news, soothes you. 

“That doesn’t mean I want things to change between us.” I can hear your smile. We hang up, you satisfied, me spiraling. 

It’s lonely without you, but far lonelier without her, my tear girl. Without you I am despaired, and without her I cannot cry, so here I exist in limbo, disgusting raw pink fleshy shame. Who will pull me out of this wound? 

You harm as much as you hurt.