“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say.
They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
To paraphrase Hemingway, I need to bleed on a page so I can be your smiley tennis correspondent tonight.
That self-deprecating funny thing I do? It’s part of my extensive, ‘more front than Mark Foys’ repertoire. That, ‘I’m over myself, I’m sorry I really, really want to be friends & I’ll show you with, ‘hey, I’m really an idiot and here are three more self-deprecating examples of how Speedy Gonzales I bounce back to form’? I sat there, holding hands & I put that great big lioness heart of mine out because feelings and you don’t have them. Never. Let. Them. See. You Cry.
You don’t remember that kiss last September, not the one where you turned your head to mine in a moment you can see the surprise on my face in the photo? It was a kiss in the cold of a day so close to heaven, a kiss hard and gentle and you and me and it happened.
It happened in that place, Peter Pan, that place between sleep and awake, that place you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I will always love you, that’s where I’ll be waiting.
- J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
I hate crying in front of people, let alone that whole body-wracking sob where the bodywork becomes a clinch with the person who has just hit you in the solar plexus just to bring you close so they can taunt you some more. I may have a reputation as the Ice Queen of the Boys to maintain, but I’m the Foreman in this Rumble in the Jungle. I punched myself out. This rope-a-dope business? You yelled at me when I couldn’t raise a glove, when there was nothing left, and you danced off those ropes and the only thing keeping me upright was pride. I focused on the canvas of the heat until I staggered once more. I stagger, in this 4am fight with myself, until I can dance off the ropes.
I’ve only just now got to reading this blog entry. To change your analogy, the dam at breaking point bursts if you don’t release what you’re holding back. ‘Don’t let them see you cry’ is harmful all round. It may not change things within that relationship, but at least you both know at the end of it what it meant to you. You couldn’t help it anyway, but it was right. xox