Tears/Tears

This text is written in collaboration with my sister, Lindsay Mailloux, in a writing exchange in 2019. Her words are in italics.

Fabric doesn’t break suddenly. It doesn’t shatter like a cup. 

(My friend Niko is a glass maker and makes beautiful, delicate cups. They are champagne glass thin, maybe thinner, with spiraling ribs running up the sides, a texture that is sometimes punctuated by color, blue or green. I dared to use a glass, gifted from Niko, like that once one summer evening. I was arranging studio materials that I had just moved to my bedroom. I set the glass on the floor, and listening to a record, caught in my own world of solitary romance. My foot (glanced) the glass and it shattered on the touch.

Some tears do happy quickly. For instance, my favorite black denim overalls, ripped up the butt when I bent too fast. And the same overalls, again, after I had mended them with an iron black denim patch, they ripped a second time when I leaned over to break down a cardboard box.

What do you know of tears, sister?

Tears do not have the brittle break, the slate rock edge. A tear can be quick, but becomes ragged with each warp and weft. 

There was a felt curtain, a foot thick, that was torn in two. According to lore it also rent that interminable wall(will) separating that thing we call human from divine love. I wonder how such a thing tore.

If you clip fabric at its edge it will tear, warp and weft separating (eagerly, reluctantly, forcefully) in an even line to the bottom. I had my friends help me do this a hot night this past summer. I was draining my bank account buying colorful sheets from thrift stores. My friends came to help me tear sheets to make into rag rugs. I was running a rag rug workshop in my neighborhood that failed. (no one showed my earnest failure now I have a tub of neatly wrapped sheets labors of love bundled into bricks). 

My sister and I like to play a game. She knows textbooks of things I don’t know. She tells me something scientific, and I tell her how it works. 

Your body makes tears when your eyes are dry.

Questions for Lindsay.

Why do our bodies cry?

When there is nothing caught in them?

What do you know about tears?

Tears come to your eyes when your body knows something is wrong. Your body is practically made of water, so it is just a matter of gathering it from different parts. Your body is 99% water, so there is some to spare, you see. Wherever there is a bit of water with time on its hands, and the eye is calling, it stops what it is doing, checking Instagram, and joins the stream heading to the eyes. They go to cleanse that dryness, but also just to mark, to make a physical change, reminding, making aware that something of no small gravitas is happening. Ishappeningnow. 

They give themselves away, riding a bit of salt, exiting the body, perhaps forever, to spread itself across a cheek, to dry quickly and absorb back into skin. To be sapped up immediately, at the tear ducts, by a soggy, disintegrating tissue, to be caught by the lips of someone who cares about you.

The body doesn’t really tear, unless brutally tortured I guess, which I don’t like to think about. I think it has to do with the distribution of mass. Bodies are thick, even when it is a petite frame of a child. Muscle might be membrane but there are layers and layers of it, all somehow woven together. Fabric is thin surface area, really just one layer of interwoven strands. Thats all. Not miles and miles of invisible cells. That’s why it is so hard to picture that fabric in the temple tearing, because it was a foot thick, because there were not just strands to separate, to pull taut and break, but whole walls of it, a whole flesh of it. 

The membranes of our body that do most often tear are almost to delicate and private to speak of. The thin skin of our lips that we might peel off when dry, or toy with just because. The vagina when giving birth. The skin around the anus when a bowel movement is to big or too hard from an unfortunate mix of too much corn beef hash and Chipotle. Fissures.

Tearing only happens to thin membranes. Things tear when they are thin, a correlating relationship… It is difficult to imagine it at a cellular level. Do the cells pull apart first? And then we see the material follow suit. Something invisible, tearing something physical…I am begin to use ellipses like my mother does…

Sister, what do you know of tears?

He is pushing her gently, wrinkled hands wrapped around the handles of her wheelchair. I am not sure if I should be watching or not. I am afraid they think I am watching because they are somewhat of a spectacle – old folks fully clothed, one with the sort of disability that can’t be hidden by skin or smiles, trundling across the hot pavement in a sea of bodies barely wearing bathing suits. 

I remember the two-week road trip with my parents and sisters. I hear our loud mantra, “wherever we go – make a spectacle!” We couldn’t hide the painful things we were bearing, wounds open to curious onlooker eyes. But we also were not willing to give up the joy that persists and resists. 

He pushes her right up to the concrete edge, close enough that I see the skepticism of several swimmers nearby. My book is at eye level, but I can’t read. I am magnetized. He locks the wheelchair so it won’t roll through those treacherous two inches. She bends her body forward, grey hair falling into her eyes, as she peels of shoes and socks. She then unhinges some hardware attached to her right leg. He folds up a towel and positions it at her feet. And with the strength that is the same strength of the joy that persists and resists, she lowers her body from her chair to the side of the pool. And then her feet. They dip into the water. 

I watch her, I watch him watch her. 

Her smile is… it’s all of the beautiful adjectives. I can only think to name it God. She moves her legs. Swish. Swash. Wish. Wash. Sigh. Cry. Why does this make me cry?

In khaki shorts and a black-and-white polka-dot blouse, she nudges past those two inches and drops into the water. He is wearing cargo shorts and a polo. The shirt is cast to the wayside as he joins her. 

I wipe the tears from behind my sunglasses. They feel like they’ve come from my chest. They remind me that I hold something. My body holds something. I don’t think about it every day, but every day it breathes in the same rhythm as my lungs. 

It’s the life that is hard-fought. It’s the magical simplicity. The joy that persists and resists. 

Sister, for all my years of school and textbooks all I know is that tears are more like magic than anything we may define or describe. 

Disappointed? Sometimes I am. For how hard I try to learn, to memorize, to rationalize, to understand… I keep coming back to find – I don’t know. For all the anatomy and physiology, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, I was never taught about tears.

A little disappointed? Yes, I guess. But it is the reaffirming kind of disappointment. The confirming, grim but resolute kind, finally knowing that I was right all along. Of course what is in me is magic. 

Aunt Mary’s eyes can’t cry, or at least, there was a time when they could not cry. And our mother rarely cries. My Aunt Mary’s tear ducts stopped working for many years. She had a condition that caused this, one that also caused her to always overheat, and sweat copiously, but never from her eyes, they were always parched. What is that condition called again? Lupus? Or an effect of Lupus?

I BURST INTO TEARS

It’s a silly saying, to imagine my body dissolved, resolving to its sixty-percent make-up, giving myself over to its most elemental state.

The word burst is also a strange one. I am held up by its particulars. In this sentence, it is strange because it is unclear if it is referring to the past tense or the present. “I bursted,” I guess, is not a proper word. 

The pipe burst. The pipe bursted.

Backwards and forwards, then and now, the present.

I think it, the thought, that I might turn back into a river. The balloon will pop. My finger will prick the spinning wheel. I will burst.

I wrote that sentence because I wonder if it will happen. If I will someday burst into tears.

I burst into tears yesterday.

In those moments I don’t like myself. I scold myself, because I don’t want to be unemotionally healthy. I want to see the evidence of grounded, but I am afraid in those moments to be so easily unmoored.

There was a thought later, as I put the groceries from Aldi’s into my car, that maybe that was groundedness. Maybe the ability of my body to be immediately in sync with my mind is a sign of oneness. 

So are tears a way of making things better. Is that the point, to make things feel more easy, more ok. I’m not sure. 

[When I focus on my breathing, I tend to start to mediate it rather than just observe it. I legislate it, counting seconds in, counting seconds out, making it labored and long. It becomes harsh, sort of abrasive as it surges through my nose. I was growing in this frustration while trying to meditate when I remembered a softer, gentler breath, that didn’t take effort, that was quiet, that took up more than just the space of my nose but the space of my whole head, somehow, and also the space of my lungs and the cavity of my chest and my stomach, settling gently, sweet.

It is her- my infant body, my 12 year old body, my sleeping body, my sewing body, my comforting body, that has always, is always, breathing, creating sustainment, taking care of me, mediating the world and my body. That breath, I don’t have to toil to engineer. That is the breath that I want to learn to listen to.]

There are three kinds of tears. Basal tears, reflex tears. emotional tears. The third one seems such a silly name. The first is the one that Aunt Mary didn’t have. The second are the ones Jenna did all of those crazy experiments in the 3rd grade with, with goggles and chopping onions under water and things. Hormones trigger the endocrine system, which triggers the ocular glands. Your tears.

But then where does the heaving breath come from. 

I am wondering now why your teachers never talked about tears. Maybe because they are not a symptom of anything physical, something that can be diagnosed and then prescribed, at least easily, which is strange. 

We ask our kids and sisters “Why are you crying?” and we know something is wrong. We certainly see tears as symptoms of something, but something that is distinctly an emotional disfunction, and anomaly, not a physical one. And we are the ones close enough to care for them. 

We don’t go to the emergency room because we are crying. We go to our mother’s laps, or our phones to call our mothers, or our big sister, or our lover.

Tears are symptomatic of nothing so serious as a burst appendix or brain bleed. But they are symptoms of emotions—sadness, empathy, surprise, shock, anger, grief. And they are a signal others can see. 

They tell ourselves something, they tell others something. 

Emotionally triggered tears are the most viscous, which is why we notice them, tracking slowly down a cheek. 

I’m afraid that was a cop out. What I wrote to you before.  That I told you a story instead of really thinking about tears. And the past where my body has endured tears. The ripped seams that I’ve tried to hold together. Holes in sweatshirts and sweaters. A certain detachment. The tears run through.

But you said it was okay. That we’ll just keep writing. You have so much confidence that this is going to be something. And not just something, but something important. Something that we need to do. For ourselves. And maybe for the world. 

Show the world.

I have your banner hanging on the wall of my living room. It’s white cloth on a white wall. But the stitched words write boldly against their double white back. 

Suddenly I found myself. 

Some days it seems true. Some days I read the words and feel the heart tug I have come to intimately know as the feeling of longing. Oh let me believe it could be true. Let it be true. 

I like that the words are there. White on white. Their camouflage somehow makes them more noticeable. I don’t have people over to my house very often. Not many people read them except for me. 

Do you remember that stack of papers with the corners bound in cloth you let me have? I think Katie might have made them… They are the size of index cards. When you gave them to me they were encased between covers with the texture of sand dollars and tied up in a gold ribbon that matched the cloth corners. I wrote on each paper in pencil a long time ago. Little by little I filled them with words. And they waited patiently in their neat stack on a dresser and a desk and a dresser and a desk again. Finally, a few weeks ago I traced the grey pencil lines in black pen. I used one of the finer tipped ones I got in a pack for Christmas. I didn’t want the ink to bleed through the backs. After I finished, I used sticky tack to put them all up on a wall in my dining room. I still haven’t had many people over to read them. Maybe three people? 

Yet they feel important. I want to show the world. 

Aunt Mary does have Lupus, but she has another autoimmune condition called Sjogren’s syndrome. I learned about Sjogren’s syndrome in my immunology class. That was the first time I understood that human’s have all these diseases that our own body’s bring within themselves. It’s the attack of the body against itself. In diabetes, you kill your pancreas. In arthritis, you kill your soft tissue between your bones that cushions your joints. In multiple sclerosis, you kill the cells that form a special sheath that protects your nervous system. Lupus is more complicated because it is systemic. It isn’t so neatly contained so the symptoms are less predictable. With Sjogren’s system your body attacks excretory glands. The glands that produce saliva. And tears. 

I can tell you must have looked up tears on the internet. I have never heard of basal tears. I learned about the basal metabolic rate in biochemistry. It is the amount of energy your body needs to keep functioning at rest. Insulin is given in basal and bolus doses. You can give someone one dose of insulin that acts for a long-time and breaks down glucose in the basal state. But then you have to give bolus insulin doses to account for all the carbohydrates in the food you eat. 

I think I know why I never learned about tears in my seven years of higher education. It’s the same reason I never learned about autism. Or eating disorders. Or compartment syndrome. It’s because there is no effective drug treatment. I was taught so much about the things we use medicine to try to fix. But so little about the things that we don’t know how to fix. 

I was sitting in a stranger’s office today. She told me I could sit wherever I wanted. There was a swivel chair tucked into a desk, two armchairs, and a couch. The obvious options. I guess with her instructions I could have also picked the rug on the floor or the window sill or the table filled with succulents. But I just sat on the couch. She told me that I am probably depressed. I had started crying before she said that. But as those words entered the room, I heard myself take a short inhale that exhaled as a soft choking sound. And I cried harder. 

Tears travel similar paths over the course of their universal existence. Pooling in corners and flooding in thin ripples down cheeks. A body lying on his back may cause them to trace a strange journey down a temple and even drip into an ear. A soft sweatshirt worn by a body nearby may soak them up. They may bead on tips of eyelashes and then transform to reunite with the vapor of the air. Or maybe cross the ridge of a nose of the body curled on her side, dropping off steeply to seep into flannel winter sheets. Some may rush down soft face skin to the pursed lips, and with the mouth opening in a gasp of a sob slip to the tongue.  

The taste of salt.

Once I was in a practice lab sometime during my second or third year of pharmacy school. We had learned about diabetes in a prior lecture and now were attempting to apply the PowerPoint concepts to the human experience. The counter was laid with an assortment of paper and plastic-wrapped supplies. We were supposed to be injecting ourselves. Mimicking the experience of a person with diabetes injecting insulin. For them, a normal routine and a personal matter of life and death, illness and health. For us, an experiment of empathy. I was in the first group of three to volunteer. I bravely filled my syringe and pushed the needle through a pinch of skin close to my belly button. Our classmates were watching eagerly, eyes wondering how much it would hurt. I heard the voices of my two comrades declare to our curious crowd that it wasn’t so bad. Just a quick burn and then it was over. Really not very painful at all. Didn’t even hurt anymore.

My head nodded in agreement, matching the response I thought I was supposed to give. But it did hurt. And it still hurt. The burn wasn’t quick and the burn wasn’t over. I looked down at the quarter patch of skin where the needle had been. It was dotted with small angry red beads. I asked one of my brave comrades in a quiet tone if this had also happened to her. She eyed my injury warily and shook her head. Nothing of the sort had happened. Her skin didn’t even bear a mark. The professor facilitating the lab heard us talking and walked over. I showed him the postage stamp spot on my stomach. He eyed the supplies on the counter we had used. We compared the little bottles of fluid sitting on the counter. The cap of my classmate’s bottle was black. The cap of mine was pink. Hers had small print on the side that read 0.9% saline. Mine displayed the words sterile water.

The blood in our bodies is salty. It’s both inside and outside of our cells. If the fluid inside a cell is more concentrated than its surrounding, extracellular fluid will rush into the cell to restore homeostasis. But if too much floods in, the cell will pop. In biological terms, it will lyse. The sterile water I had accidentally injected was too dilute and seeped into my body’s cells. They couldn’t withstand this noble homeostatic attempt. And so the cells burst.  

Bursted?