Lately I’ve been thinking of that quote from The Sound and the Fury: “I wasn’t crying but I couldn’t stop.” That’s how it feels of late. Our journal requires much planning, being run by a thimble-sized staff, so there are often months between selecting poems, writing letters from the editor—whatever that is for anyways—and the release. I don’t know what the world will look like at the end of June.
I’m writing this in the middle of May. I am grateful. My income is okay, I am safe, I am healthy, I prefer my own company. And yet every day I just want to weep. For myself; for my friends, losing people they love; for people who will not listen; for the world.
If I were not the editor in chief—and did not have to keep up some level of decorum—I would have done away with the Faulkner quote and gone straight to telling you what it feels like: cry-constipation. You want to let it out. Keeping it in feels unhealthy, like it’s going to come out badly anyways. You’re so uncomfortable and anxious. You want it on your own terms, damnit. You try and you try, but still nothing. You’re afraid right now to be vulnerable. You feel like an ungrateful fool. So you think, What are the things that help? (With crying, I mean, not the other thing; we’re not that kind of journal.) You think of the time your therapist said he used to have a patient come in two times a month and weep because his dog had died. This went on for a year. And your therapist added that all he could tell the patient was that the mourning is not inordinate; all it means is he must have loved his dog a lot.
And then it’s okay somehow, what you are feeling. You can mourn something (even as big and impossible as the world changing). All it means is you must have loved it a lot. It was full of things big and small. And how you loved the small things—grabbing coffee without a second thought, going to the store like it wasn’t a game of Tetris, touching every book in a bookstore.
Here is a journal with a few small things. It’s okay if you want to mourn them. It’s okay if you’re not crying and can’t stop.
