I don't know what it is about public transportation, but I can't seem to be aboard a bus or a train for more than five minutes before crying. When I lived in Chicago, there was about a 90 % chance that within a few minutes of sitting on a bus by myself I would tear up. On several occasions I caught myself making the 'about to cry face' and had to change my thoughts to keep strangers oblivious to my turmoil. Some people are just ugly when they cry, I am one of those people.
I remember when I first saw myself cry. I was in the make up room at a musical theater surrounded by other high school boys putting on stage make up and preparing to preform in our production of Grease. It was five minutes until the curtain went up and I was attempting to put make up on like I saw everyone else doing. Stage make up is dramatic and orange up close and I looked like pounded a pumpkin pie into my face. I had never been on stage before and I think between the nerves and looking like an idiot I just had to cry, and I did. I didn't cry for long though, because when I saw my lips curl and my eyes sag and my cheeks dimple I was to embarrassed at how ugly my cry face was to continue being scared.
Ever since then I try my hardest not to cry in front of people, but something about being on a bus made me not care as much. I still tried to mask my face but if tears swelled I did not wipe them away. There were times that I saw other people cry on the bus, one instance stands out sharply in my mind, and it was not on a bus but a train. I was on the red line train going to Kevin's to make dinner, my groceries piled in my lap and secured by a hug. There was a girl, probably in her mid twenties, wrapped up in a scarf and a big hat, her coat cloaking what was sure to be a perfect body underneath. She sat in a seat that faced me, the window to her right and it was strange because we couldn't stop looking at each other.
Usually prolonged eye contact is uncomfortable and as a general rule I avoid eye contact all together, but she looked into my eyes and I looked into hers for a very long minute. Before she broke eye contact her eye lids quivered and she turned, putting her head against the window with a thud and I watched her fight the cry face.
I talked to my friend Nick about this and he said, "Uh yeah, I've had some of my best crys on the Chicago CTA." When he said that and as we talked, I didn't feel so alone. I had been in constant shock as to the reasons I found myself crying on buses daily, I didn't know why. What I've come to know now, is that the bus was literally the only time I was alone with my thoughts. I was either at home with my 7 room mates, or with Kevin and his room mates or at work surrounded by angry customers; the bus gave me clarity.
Before I moved to Chicago I had gone almost 24 years without making peace with a single wrong that was done to me or with the decisions I have made that were detrimental to my heart. Instead I pushed them aside and let them spoil in the angry parts of my mind. It seemed that it wasn't until I left Kansas that I was able to face these things, these memories that creeped up on me at strange times in strange places weather it be in a public bathroom, or in the city walking to no where or on a bus. Every day for six months since I left everything I know about the world I have confronted these memories and let them go. But not all at once, I only have the energy to dissect a singular past situation a day.
I'll spend an entire day for example, looking deeply into the memory, as I did yesterday, of my step father pushing me down a small stair case the day after my appendectomy when I was 18. I never forgave him and I can not bare to carry with me memories that I let go unforgiven. So I will make peace with it, forgive myself and my past and expel the power I've given these distant heart aches. Sometimes it makes me cry, and in Chicago it happened daily in the seat of a bumpy bus.
People don't like to talk about how petrifying moving across the country alone is and how it shakes you to your core. Instead they call the times that you cry alone on a bus, part of an adjustment period. My mother kept saying to me, "Ryan, this is an adjustment period and you have to be patient." When people say things like that what they really mean by adjustment period is, "you are going to strip everything you know about yourself away and be left with nothing and that nothingness is what people call a clean slate," which I suppose is what I wanted out of this all, a clean slate.
The word clean is good, and having a clean slate sounds good and is good. It is also something that to be obtained takes an abundance of bravery and it is something that when achieved feels nothing like you thought it would. A clean slate can sometimes be the loneliest thing in the world. On the other hand a clean slate is under-rated. The whole, "you can't run from your problems," thing is bullshit, because you can. Before I left Kansas and before I left Chicago people kept telling me, "you're just running away Ryan."
They are right, I am running and I'm going to keep running. I think the people who have said things like that to me are referring to kids, bills, shitty jobs, etc. when they use the word problems. Those aren't problems, those things are responsibility, and trust me, you cannot run from that. A problem, a real life problem, is when you are in a place where you've grown as much as you can but stay anyway out of fear. That is a problem you can run from, and it's a problem that once left, cannot follow you. I was running away from my memories, and those followed me and I dealt with them with the grace that uprooting myself gave me. Unfortunately that process is what Kevin didn't understand and is what ultimately ended our relationship.
I've been thinking a lot about Kevin. When he broke up with me, among many things, he said, "the lack of affection is what first made me start to distance myself from you." As I sit in this empty house in California I am churning his last words to me, picking out the things that hold no truth and that we said in anger and looking deeply into the things he said that were so true I've waited over a month to confront them; as they are truths about myself so true that to admit their validity is to surrender myself to fault.
Kevin is right though, I wasn't affectionate enough for him, I think dealing with my life changing outside of the relationship took so much emotional energy that I didn't have the energy to reciprocate his touch outside of the bedroom. Kevin's understanding of quantum physics was vast but higher levels of love and emotions and the roots of those emotions floated through his brain in search of a place they could land and be understood. He always tried to understand, I'll give him that, but he didn't. I loved how scientific his mind was, he would sometimes read me his multivariable calculus and inorganic chemestry text books in bed while my head rested on his stomach. I loved his mind but resented it for not seeing the me I kept hidden but was willing to release with even the slightest bit of prodding.
Kevin and I cooked a lot together. We were poor so cooking for us consisted of opening marinara sauce and waiting for the noodles to stop boiling. One night while we waited for the water to boil, he took corn starch out of the refrigerator and and poured it into a bowl partially filled with water. I had seen this done before, and was one of my favorite science experiments as a child and I leaned it in fourth grade. It was supposed to help explain to a young mind how molecules fuse together and how they become loose and detach. Once the water and starch mixed together it created a substance that was tight as a rock when you gripped it firmly and became brittle and cracked when you gripped it to tightly. When you hold this substance in your fist and recline your fingers, it would slowly turn soft, then to liquid and run down your hand and drip through your fingers.
My heart is the result of a similar mixture. If you hold my heart to firmly I will become brittle and crack under the pressure of your immense love. Conversely, if you reduce your grip I will bleed and drain out of your life. I cannot blame Kevin for resenting my lack of affection. I cannot blame him for that because I am the one who told him to back off, that I needed time to build trust in our love before I was able to reciprocate his. He listened and pulled so far away that I could not see him; and that is where i do blame him. I blame him for not knowing how to hold my heart, instead he squeezed the shit out of it, then flattened his hand and watched me turn to putty and then to liquid that dripped away from his fingers and onto the floor. I blame him for that and for causing me to show him my cry face.
I wish that face was not his last image of me, because it is such a profoundly ugly face.
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