An Account of Crying 2.0

Here is a revision to a story I posted earlier. This one is much better. I am going to try to submit this to some literary journals. Any thoughts? I'd love your comments.


P.S. Although this is loosely based on various autobiographical events of my life, a great deal of it is entirely made up. So it is a piece of fiction.

An Account of Crying

By Patrick Knott

Mary and I hadn’t spoken in about two hours. We were silently packing boxes, taping them, and moving them into a pile in the far corner of the emptying living room. There really was nothing more to say, I was moving out, and when I set my mind to something that is it. Mary couldn’t handle the thought of living in the house without me, and couldn’t really afford it anyway, so we were going to pack it up together, and that would be that.

“Why is it always your way or the highway!” she had screamed at me earlier that day.

I said nothing. Mary stared intently at me for several seconds, turned around, walked into the kitchen and out of my view, and then returned moments later with the potted cactus I had given her on her 24^th birthday. She held it and we stared at each other a while longer, neither of us moving. Suddenly, perhaps to break the silence without actually having to speak, she took the pot in one petite hand and, like a shot-putter, flung it at my head. I ducked, and it crashed against the hallway wall, scattering broken shards of tan porcelain, and clumps of black soil across the hardwood floor. The cactus itself fell with a thump, its roots tangled and exposed, its prickly green arms stretching out in despair. I quietly grabbed the broom from a closet in the kitchen and began cleaning it up. After that she knew there was nothing she could say to save us.

Mary was the first one to break the silence at about 6pm. These silences were like a game between us, and I always won.

“I ordered a pizza, it should be here in about thirty minutes, you can have some if you’re hungry”. I looked up from my crouched position and saw she had been crying, her makeup was a mess and she had hastily tried to fix it. She looked ashamed.

“Ok, thanks” I said, and after a moment, “I’ll give you some money”.

“It’s ok,” she said.

The rest of the night we didn’t say much else, just more packing, taping, cleaning. By 9pm we were finished. We had moved everything either to the dumpster, or to the U-Haul truck I had rented. Mary was flying on a red-eye that night to Tennessee to spend a month with her brother. This meant I would have to take her share of our things and put them in a storage unit for her, but I didn't really mind that. I wanted to be as compliant as possible. I wanted things to be smooth.

          Standing at the back of the open trailer I set the last box onto the silvery metal floor of the truck. I reached up with both hands and grabbed the black rubber handle of the back gate and jumped down to the street, letting gravity pull my body down to close truck. The gate rattled loudly and I intentionally slammed it down hard so that the metal latch clanged aggressively into the locked position.

         “What the hell?” Mary said in an aggravated whisper?

         “What?” I replied, “do you need to go back inside and get anything or are you ready to go now?” Mary turned without responding and walked back into the house to get her bags. I waited by the car and smoked a cigarette. It was late September in Portland so the days were getting longer, colder, and wetter. I shivered a bit in the breeze and observed the orange haze of low-lying clouds visible through the light of a street-lamp. It began to rain. I covered my cigarette with my free hand but did nothing to shelter my head. I felt my shaggy hair growing heavier with each drop and after a minute or two my saturated scalp allowed the pooled up water to pour down my cheeks and run into the corners of my mouth.

         Mary scurried out of the house, one hand covering her head with a newspaper and the other tightly grasping her bag that was pulling her down like a great magnet drawn to the earth.

         “A little help?” she said. I casually threw my cigarette on the ground, stomped it out, and opened the back hatch of the decades-old, brown Volvo station wagon. I made a genuine attempt to intercept her before she made it to the car and grab the bag for her, but I was too slow and she loaded it herself.

         “What time is your flight?” I asked as I slammed the hatch shut. She was peeved at my repeated slamming.

         “Why are we standing in the rain?” She asked, and walked around to enter the passenger side door.

         “What times is your flight?” I asked again after we settled in the car.

         “11.” She said.

The car ride was peaceful in the kind of way that the cabin of a ship might be in a storm. The winds outside are howling but inside there is just soft rolling, the creak of wood being stressed, and the subtle scrape of objects sliding to and fro on their shelves. When we arrived at the terminal, I pulled over and opened the door. Like exiting the cabin of the ship we were met with a chaotic cacophony of honking car horns, police whistles, and the intermittent rumble of aircraft overhead. I thought about parking and walking her inside, but I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. As I stepped from the car to help with the bags, Mary broke the silence again but I couldn’t hear her. I leaned my head back in and she repeated,

“Aren’t you going to cry?” Her tone was sorrowful and it turned my stomach because I knew I couldn’t possibly feel what she was feeling. Her green eyes met mine; streaks of black mascara now shamelessly tainting her powdered cheeks. I contemplated my response. Volumes of emotion were flitting through my mind like an automatic Rolodex on the fritz.

“Probably not” I said.

***

When I got home I wasn’t ready to walk back into the empty house alone. I only had one more night to stay, and I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the hardwoods. It was just too depressing to face sober, so I walked to the closest bar to lubricate my sorrows a little bit. I sat silent at the bar, staring into my beer and the bartender let me be. There was hardly anybody there, but a good bartender knows when a person needs some old fashioned cheering up and when someone needs to be left to alone. This was a good bartender.

“You need a refill?” he’d suggest every ten minutes or so when I was nearing the end of my drink. I’d nod and he’d refill.

At about 1:15am, when the lines between the poly-coated chestnut bar-top and the vacant space beyond it began to blur, when my foot kept slipping off the barstool and I’d slosh some beer out of my clear glass mug and onto my hand, when the lemons and limes in the garnish tray all looked the same, I walked back home in the drizzling rain. When I entered I kept the lights off. It seemed darker than usual. The unfamiliarity of the house caused by the lack of furniture mixed with my inebriation made it difficult to navigate through in the dark, so I kept my hands along the walls. I closed my eyes to complete the darkness and in that void made my way to the back of the house. I staggered into the room that Mary and I used to share. Turning on the light made me wince and I noticed tiny specks of dust floating around in the air. I closed the door and watched the heavy wood panel slide shut from left to right and the unexpected sweeping sound it made was shocking in a way. It was upsetting how the echoes bounced around the room. I wondered how, after a year of struggle with that door, I managed to get it closed with ease this time. One of the screws holding the track to the floor was partially up and stripped beyond repair. Usually it required the right leverage on the top of the inverted handle that would cause the bottom of the door to slide smoothly over, but I always seemed to forget and would get frustrated when it jammed. I was thinking about how lucky I was for a little while but it was probably only a moment. Time is pretty irrelevant in general, especially when you are nowhere, doing nothing.

            I stripped down into just my underwear. I walked over to the outlet below the windowsill and plugged my phone into its charger, and the response was an old familiar vibration in my palm. I laid out the sleeping bag and crawled inside. It occurred to me that I had neglected to leave a pillow behind so I awkwardly inch-wormed my way to my pile of clothes and bound them up below my head.

            On normal occasions my brain would have just worked itself to sleep and then the dreams would come and then the morning. Not this night though. Something profound happened. Something that I still don’t fully understand. What happened was my head exploded. Or at least that is what it felt like. Finally, in the privacy of this empty space, I rambled to myself so fast that like an eclipse of the brain, everything went black. My fractured words bounced around the room and re-entered my ears. Somewhere in the depths of my brain I tried to get a hold of myself and stop this but I had lost all agency. I had reached the end of the line. I felt a bubble in my chest. It started subtly but picking up speed it settled just at the top of my throat. I held my breath to keep it in. Then, with pressure building, it burst forth into the world. 25 years of anxiety and emotion called out to the night, filling all of Oregon with its soft sobbing song.

            I cried for a about twenty minutes. Blurting out half sentences in utter despair. I did that kind of crying that children often do when they are actually upset, as opposed to that fake crying they do when they can tell you noticed they fell down and they want the attention. The sort of crying that makes your breathing come out in short, wheezing bursts. I did this and was surprised at how much my nose ran. I thought to myself “Is this what happens? How do people deal with all of this? Do regular people just carry tissues around all the time in case this happens?” I was reluctant to go get toilet paper from the bathroom for my nose because I was afraid the echoing of my pathetic sobbing would wake up the neighbors. I was terrified of being vulnerable even to strangers. Instead, I just wiped my nose with the legs of the pants that I had bundled under my head.

I cried off and on for about an hour. I had taken the curtains down earlier that day and when all the crying was done, I noticed that the moon was in full view and everything was illuminated in its glow. It occurred to me that the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared, and after that I didn’t cry again.

            I laid awake a little while longer and thought about my father. I wondered if he had felt the same nostalgic terror when he spent his last night in our home back when I was 8. That night that he told my sister and me that he was divorcing my mother. I remembered that he cried then too, right in front of us, unashamed and raw.

The next morning I was awoken by the sounds of piano coming from the apartment upstairs. It was a warm and wandering sound and the notes floated around in my ears. I got up and in the light of day looked out the 2^nd story window at the cars on Burnside St. I imagined myself floating on those piano notes, slowly over the bungalow homes, swirling up the Willamette River and East through the Columbia Gorge. I saw myself riding that music across the dense wilderness of the Hood National Forest and up above those snow-capped peaks. I joined the circles of black birds that swirl and swoop around an old brick chimney in autumn. I saw myself high above the continent and then returned to alight on a park bench atop Mt. Tabor and looked down on Portland as it woke for the day. It yawned and opened its eyes, and so did I.