NONFICTION BY JOSHUA JAMES AMBERSON

DRY EYES

I set up on the floor of the trailer I shared with my mom, baseball cards spread out in front of me, ready for game six of the World Series. I was ten years old and my favorite team, the Atlanta Braves, was playing the Toronto Blue Jays. I loved the Braves because of their precise pitchers who created slow-paced games with more strikeouts than hits. It wasn't the kind of baseball a ten-year-old was supposed to like, but I was a pitcher in Little League, and my dream was to someday pitch no-hitters. I didn't throw particularly fast or use a lot of wild change-ups, but I was careful, consistent, and better than my teammates at not letting my emotions get the best of me.

The game went into extra innings, and I was transfixed by the low score, the held tension. When the Blue Jays scored two points at the top of the eleventh, I got nervous. In the bottom of the inning, the Braves looked like they were going to tie it, even win it.

But they fell short.

In the woods of rural Washington State, as far away from the game as possible while still being in the continental United States, I wept. I rarely cried, rarely felt the need to cry, but baseball was my life and the World Series was the most important event I could imagine. The Braves losing meant that I had to wait a year to see them try again, and a year was a lifetime. By myself, on the floor, my tears went on and on, I couldn't make them stop.

✺

Last year I didn't cry. Or at least, when I looked back at the end of the year, I couldn't think of a time when tears actually made it out of my eyes and onto my cheeks. I wasn't sure whether I had a block around tears, or just a block around the memory of tears. Perhaps this wouldn't have mattered so much if I hadn't spent the bulk of my adulthood preoccupied with emotional health, dissecting my reactions for clues to why I am the way I am, believing myself to be emotionally aware. I thought back and tried to make a mental list of all the times in recent years that I cried and, at first, I could only think of death.

I cried when two of my friends died in a warehouse fire a little over a year ago. I cried a few months before that when my cousin died from a blood clot in the night—weeks after a leg amputation that had gone well. I cried when one of my closest friends purposefully jumped from the top of a waterfall to his death a year-and-a-half prior, and when an old high school friend shot himself in the head a couple years before that.

But each time, I didn't cry much, and only with one other person, never in public, or even in private. My eyes welled up at each of their respective funerals or memorials, but tears didn't leave my eyes. It was never out of any conscious stifling, nor tangible shame or remnants of shame, but just because my body didn't feel the need to weep.

I talk to each of those lost loved ones on occasion. I write letters to them, I think of things I need to tell them, books and albums I want to recommend, I laugh at our inside jokes and think about how these jokes are only inside of me now. Sometimes their absence hits me in the grocery store or on the bus, the pressure filling my chest, and I wonder if I can handle its force—if I'm built to love as many people as I do since love also means so much heartbreak, so much loss.

I call my best friend and ask her, “How much have you seen me cry?” Aside from a handful of memorable moments of sadness in our 17-year relationship, she says most of her memories involve laughing. And it's true: I used to laugh to the point of tears on a fairly regular basis. But I can't even remember doing that last year. And her reminder that I cry from laughter doesn't alleviate my worry that I'm blocked emotionally. That somehow, I have forgotten how to cry in sadness, in heartache, in grief.

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During the era I obsessed over slow baseball games, I almost exclusively listened to the oldies station. At the time this meant music from when the term rock n' roll was coined in 1951 to somewhere around the Summer of Love. While I've never heard anyone refer to this period as the golden age of crying songs, I feel I can easily make a case for it.

The station played “Lonely Teardrops,” “96 Tears,” “Valley of Tears,” “Letter Full Of Tears,” “Tears of a Clown,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” and “The Tracks of My Tears.” They played “Cry,” “Cry Baby,” “Cry Like a Baby,” “It's Time to Cry,” “I'm Gonna Sit Right Down (And Cry Over You),” “(If You Cry) True Love True Love,” “Big Girls Don't Cry,” “Judy's Turn to Cry,” “Cry to Me,” and I loved them all. 

Perhaps more than any other, though, I loved Roy Orbison's “Crying,” which is still, over a half-century after it was released, one the most commonly referenced songs about crying. “I was alright,” Orbison begins, “for a while.” Gradually, he unveils how far from alright he's fallen, and by the end of the song's compact two minutes and 45 seconds, he's breaking down, the star of his own tragic opera. It's difficult to listen to his lack of restraint, his unapologetic sincerity, without having some kind of reaction—it's either deeply moving or hilariously over the top, and not much in between. As a kid, the song's haunting passion enchanted me. It didn't seem disturbed. I understood that this is what people did: they cried over other people. This level of passion was natural and right. Even if I didn't always show it, I felt it.

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Science separates tears into three categories: the continuous tears that moisturize our eyes, the reflex tears that appear when we yawn and that flush out fallen eyelashes, and the emotional tears we release when we are in some way moved. These categories are broad. It seems silly that we categorize the tears from being punched in the face with the tears from chopping an onion. And even worse—fundamentally wrong, even—that the tears from watching a loved one succeed and a loved one die are categorically the same. The range of emotional tears, especially, is so great that it seems each deserves its own category, its own word, its own bit of recognition.

As far as we know, humans are the only species to produce tears of emotion. Darwin called emotional tears one of the “special expressions of man.” In Tom Lutz's book Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, he calls it a “human universal,” since, “[t]hroughout history, and in every culture, emotional tears are shed—everyone, everywhere, cries at some time.” 

Yet despite their ubiquity, no one really understands why we cry tears of emotion. Through the ages and across disciplines, countless ideas have been presented. Some have conceived of tears as just a biological overflow of unwanted toxins. Some have pointed to the painkilling neurotransmitter unique to emotional tears and have suggested we cry because it's a pleasurable chemical hit. And across the ages, many have considered tears a cathartic emotional necessity. While most of our current cultural attitude around emotional tears treats the idea of catharsis as a basic truth, even that's up for debate. “After a century of therapeutic theorizing and research, there is still no hard evidence that tears are in fact cathartic,” Lutz writes, “and there is some to suggest that they are not.”

Obscuring this human universal even further is the fact that the norms around crying differ wildly between cultures and, as much as we've been led to believe otherwise, gendered attitudes around crying have no consistency through history or across cultures. I obsess about the influence of gender norms on my own tears, because I worry my block is due to an aspect of male socialization I have yet to kick. I worry I'm unconsciously idealizing an image of an unemotional stoicism that was pushed on me by the larger culture, even as I've spent years critiquing it, making fun of it, thinking I was past it.

I often think about how I lucked out, since—in the absence of my biological father—the men in my life were my grandpa and my uncle, two caring and emotionally open men. Though neither cried a lot, it wasn't unusual to see them cry and they never told me it was something to be ashamed of. But the culture as a whole—from characters in movies to the men in our small town—convinced me men should be ashamed to cry. I often recall my childhood as a montage of my emotional friends being told to suck it up by their angry dads. At school, kids who cried were made fun of, becoming targets for bullies. So I got good at holding it in. I know some of this has stuck around, but I have no idea how to identify where it begins or ends. How do we separate socialization and honest emotional reaction? Time seems to weave them together, to make them appear as one and the same.

✺

Seven years ago, I had the flu, a fever that made me weak, leaving me stuck on a basement futon, watching movie after movie. In this marathon, I put on Footloose, a movie I'd always mocked for its improbable town-that-bans-dancing plot. But in my sickness, my desire to be entertained, I cast all doubts aside. By the time Kevin Bacon—as outsider, dance-obsessed bad kid Ren McCormack—stepped to the front of the town-hall meeting, I was invested. He quoted Bible passages that portrayed dancing not as the sinful activity the town council insisted it was, but as a celebration of God, the natural reaction to religious ecstasy, using the town's weapon against them. Lying in bed, covered in layers of blankets, cold and alone, I wept. This speech, I felt, righted a great injustice, conveying a depth that was obscured by the movie's surface.

I was a mess.

The scene changed. John Lithgow—as record-burning, anti-dance activist Reverend Shaw Moore—practiced his sermon to empty pews, his wild daughter watching from the back, and I kept right on crying. 

Later, when my roommates got home from work and asked how I was doing, I told them I had bawled to Footloose, and we all laughed, amused that my weak state of mind made me cry to a film where the most memorable scene involved two tractors playing chicken.

But after my fever passed, I re-watched it, and cried again.

This is what confuses me most as I sift through my memories of tears and recall some of the smaller, less-obvious moments: they're rarely based on the degree of emotion I feel, or feel I should feel.

Maybe the inconsistency of tears is just one of their universal mysteries, but it seems most people can say they always cry during particular moments, or in response to specific situations, and I just can't. I've sat dry-eyed at dozens of weddings and funerals while everyone around me wept, but I once cried while donating a car that had been sitting in my driveway for months. I don't cry following large-scale tragedies where I don't know any of the deceased, even though I've lost friends and acquaintances to mass shootings and venue fires. I've never cried when any of my favorite musicians, writers, or actors have died, but I've cried multiple times while getting garden beds ready for winter. I can't put any of the memories together and make sense of them.

Last year was the worst year for American politics in my lifetime. There were upheavals and fall-outs in my family. I dealt with multiple health issues. I produced some of the most vulnerable pieces of writing I've ever worked on. It seems like it should have been a year for crying.

My friends regularly tell me about having good cries that help them through situations, that let out tension and stress, and their experiences make me wish I had that kind of relationship with crying. It's hard for me to call my current relationship with crying a relationship at all, since I have no idea how it works. The hidden waterworks and I are strangers inhabiting the same body. Aside from their appearance following tragic loss, my tears arrive unexpectedly, following no pattern I can make sense of, and can evidently disappear for an entire year without me even noticing.

✺

A couple years ago, I got a call that my old cat Orson was dying. When I'd moved two hours south a few years prior, he'd stayed with my roommates, but I still felt a parental attachment. So I made plans to take the train up, to be with him in his final days, to say goodbye.

Before I could buy my ticket, my friend called back to tell me Orson had taken a turn for the worse, that he might die at any moment. She asked if I wanted to talk to him. “On the phone?” I asked. She said sure, why not. So, surrounded by his new owners, people I didn't know, she put me on speakerphone. I'm shy about the phone in general and feel especially uncomfortable with speakerphone—even with close friends it feels like a job interview, an act where my every word is monitored. But I reminded myself that this was my last chance.

“Hey Orson,” I said. “I hear you're in pretty bad shape.” My voice shook, and cracked slightly on the last word. “I'm so sorry you're in so much pain.” I closed my eyes and imagined him as best I could, imagined him responding to my voice, imagined him feeling the moment in the same way I was feeling it. “I've been thinking a lot about all the good times we had.” I paused as the tears covered my face, the flow of them so unexpected. “And how much joy you brought to so many people.” My nose running, I could barely get the words out. “I just want you to know that I love you,” I said, as I cried into the silence on the other end.

When I got off the phone, my face still damp, I felt complete in a way I hadn't in years, like I had an emotional breakthrough. But then I wondered why this breakthrough had happened with a cat. Why had I cried more for an animal than I had for my lost human loved ones? Perhaps I channeled my grief from other losses into this one because it felt safe—a place where visible grief wasn't expected, where there was no pressure. The more I thought about it, the breakthrough became questionable, turned strange in my mind. 

✺

In the community education writing classes I teach, people cry. I don't push for it to happen, or ask students to write about their most vulnerable moments, but every quarter, in each class, at least one person cries. In a class I taught a few years ago, every student cried. Crying happened so regularly, they began calling it group therapy.

In the controlled setting of a classroom where I'm the teacher, I've developed an approach to responding to tears. I don't act surprised when it happens, I don't act like it's a fire to be put out, I just let it happen. In my peripheral vision I note other students checking my reaction, and when they see I'm okay with it, they often relax. The tears usually occur when students are reading their work, so when they finish reading or reach a point where they can't go on, I thank them, I nod and make eye contact, letting them know I take it seriously. I give the class a brief moment to feel the weight of what's just been shared, then move on. 

I've found that most people don't want a spotlight on them after it happens, they don't want to talk it out, they just want to share what they wrote. They only get embarrassed if we linger too long—making an issue of the crying suggests that it's not a perfectly normal and warranted thing to do. My method probably doesn't work for everyone, but countless students over the years have told me that they have felt comfortable sharing and safe crying in my classes. I always thank them, and tell them that it's the kind of space I seek to create, how I hope people will feel. But then I go home, wondering about my dry eyes; wondering how I can create that space for others but can't create it for myself.

✺

Some of my favorite crying songs are songs about the desire to not cry. Early soul music is full of these. I think of Anna King belting the title refrain of “I Don't Want to Cry,” over and over, clearly announcing that she can't help but cry, though wishes it was possible, even imaginable, to stop. Etta James' loss was so great that crying was all she could do. John Ellison couldn't stop crying long enough to go outside, afraid to show his tear-laden face to the world. A dozen male soul singers have wished for rain, so as to hide their tears, the tears they're ashamed of but can't find an end to.

I'm pulled toward these songs with unhinged narrators, their sadness uncontrollable. Their grief—so oversized, so constant—resonates, and inside I feel that I am this person: destroyed by my emotions, perpetually on the verge of falling apart. Even though, in the self I present to the world, I'm so rarely that person.

Usually I don't worry about the gap between those selves and simply hold them as two simultaneous truths. Though I sometimes worry that in doing so I'm ignoring a block, I don't feel either is a lie. I typically tell people how I'm feeling. I'm open about the emotional trials I'm going through. I don't hide them. Being around other people just has a way of putting my more extreme emotions into perspective and calming my worries. If I wasn't living my life concerned that my emotional reactions don't manifest publicly like those around me, I probably wouldn't feel like I was lacking.

I read psychology and sociology books about tears, novels and poetry collections. I read about being overcome by tears, tears that won't shut off. I read about performed tears, manipulating others with tears. I read about tears of religious fervor, of anger, of unfathomable loss—a myriad of tears I don't want in my life. I realize what I'm seeking is some universally agreed upon, proper amount of tears that doesn't exist. I'm wanting to cry about the justified sadnesses at the right moments. To cry more, but not too much.

✺

I get an email that my 89-year-old grandpa—the man I lived with for the first twelve years of my life—had, in the middle of the night, woken up and began vomiting uncontrollably. He was weak, had a fever that wouldn't drop, trouble breathing. With no answers as to why, I jump to worst-case scenarios and worry the rest of the night. I go to bed and can't sleep. I imagine all the things I've spent my life trying not to imagine: his decline, what I'll say at his funeral, the great absence he'll leave in my world and what that absence will feel like. Facing the wall, my body shaking, I cry into my pillow. The tears are easy, surprising, and it takes me a second to realize what's happening. I don't try to analyze it, and I don't try to stop it or play it up. It's a quiet moment of release, private, incomparable, smaller than any song ever claimed.

Joshua James Amberson is a regular contributor to Hobart and The Portland Mercury, and his work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tin House, among others. He's the author of the chapbook Everyday Mythologies on Two Plum Press, and co-hosts the book and music podcast The Steer. Though he rarely mentions it, he's had encounters with aliens, as well as ghosts.