“Drink moderately, for drunkenness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise”
-Cervantes
My mom cries at movies really easily. She’d say that she’d cry when a stoplight changed to green because it used to be such a pretty shade of red.
I hated crying at movies. I’d fight it, which usually was much more work, and made stranger sounds.
My parents saw a lot of movies. A whole lot. And I did too, until I moved out and went to college. Or when I was introduced to recreational drug use in high school. And what a recreation it was.
A few months after I turned 21 a beautiful writer in my class broke my heart. After a night out with his friends drinking at bars, (which while the drinking was not new, he was, and so was bar culture) he told me he loved me and kissed me and spent the night sweetly with me in my bed holding me and kissing me, only to pretend it didn’t happen the next day. Like most sad fucks, I decided to spend a lot of time drinking at bars. I figured I could some how recreate that night with someone else, and find out how it could all mean nothing, or so little, or be induced. I tried this for seven months. I failed one class, and got an incomplete in another, which is a nice way of saying you failed but your prof is giving you extra time to pull your shit together.
I had no luck recreating what I wanted, and it was around this time that I discovered and started holding sayings like “En vino veritas” and “Drunk men tell no lies” very dear to me.
When I came back from an unfulfilling night, which they all were, I’d chain smoke on the steps of my dorm-it was the oldest building on campus, the most coveted dormitory in the oak-lined quad. Landscaping and impressive old buildings. It was also very close to town. There were lots of students in that area, and plenty of people who saw me sobbing fit to die.
I was leaving a hip dive bar and crying, as I liked to do. And this addict girl I knew from my favorite coffee shop-she was bad off. Begging for money all the time. She saw me, and she hugged me with her bone arms and asked if someone hurt me. Yeah. So that was a low point.
I moved out of the beautiful dorm and into a moldy duplex in a pretty part of town. It had a carport where my housemates and I smoke and drank and talked. Our place was broken into a couple of times, and I strung lots and lots of colored Christmas lights up because it was pretty, but also to deter any more break ins.
I failed out of school because I didn’t see much of a reason to go. I was on academic probation. I continued to live in my college town, in the same duplex with different housemates. I worked at an ice cream store and started to see a therapist who had a bowl haircut and wore hippy dresses. I cried every night for hours and hours on that carport, until one day I didn’t. I went out to my carport, where it was my ritual to chain smoke and cry. And I couldn’t cry. I didn’t need to anymore. It was a little startling, like a good friend didn’t show up for a date. What the hell was I supposed to do with my time? It was a warm spring night and I went to bed at a reasonable hour. I graduated about eight months later.
Recently I watched a cartoon at a theater, and I won’t tell you which, but I watched it and cried profusely, unrestrainedly, because I can’t be embarrassed by it anymore.
