“As soon as I lay down I began crying. I could not stop. The crying was quiet and wet. It was impossible to sniff it back or swallow it down my throat. It just came and kept coming, like a steady leak. It seemed that something was broken inside me. It was not normal to cry this way.
“Whatever toughness and resilience I thought I had was gone. I’d been fighting emotions for years, since the earthquake of my parents’ divorce. Now emotions had me surrounded, and I had to let them do whatever (destructive, terrifying thing) it was that emotions did.
“I hadn’t been in a place from which I could not escape, in some for or other, in years. I had been trying to avoid this. But it was the only thing I should have been doing.”
(…)
“I fell asleep and woke up crying.
“It felt like a miracle. An evil miracle. But still, one that needed to happen.
“Now I knew what had been motivating me.
“The next morning I felt leveled. I was next to the Crip in the morning lineup. Tears continued to slide out of my eyes. I trid to stand very straight to compensate. The Crip, one leg bent, one straight, looked at me hard, leaned in, and shouted in my face, “What the __fuck’s__ the matter with this guy!?”
“I did not react. He laughed, and turned away. But I caught a flicker of something in his eyes. He didn’t want what I had.”