Tears

All the ways you can cry:
You can wake up yourself at night crying, and wonder how many hours you've cried in your sleep.
You can wake up in the morning and feel a kind of blankness and unease, just like you feel before you notice you have a toothache, and then remember what's happened and you cry.
You can cry while you cook dinner.
You can cry while you ride in the car and the kids are being rowdy and the man's making vulgar jokes and really, you don't have to hide it because no one ever looks at your face or expects you to contribute anything anyway.
You can cry falling asleep.
You can cry in class, at the barre, struggling to focus through it, to keep your face serene.
You can cry while he's having sex with you and again, it's a fine time to cry and he probably won't notice.
You can cry while you're taking a walk. But you usually don't. The motion's hypnotic, a rosary of steps.
You can wake up with a start and make plans for how things will be better, long intricate many-branched plans, and then gradually it hits you that it's four in the morning and the practicalities are all against you and you go on, weaving arguments and persuasions and images and schemes and holding your head because your skull feels like it's flying apart, each plate to a different corner of the cosmos, until at last there is nothing but begging, please, please, please.
Some days, most days, you're in tears on and off, all day.
And for a day or two it feels novel, like this is something fresh and important you're doing, like surely the universe will answer you, until you start to remember what it was like before, the months upon months, the years of your life when you were in tears on and off, day after day.
And no one answered you.
And you remember that this has been such a big chunk, easily more than half, your adult life.
And you keep on crying, conjuring up the most poignant scenes, imagining how you would cling to her knees and beg, beg, anything to make yourself cry again —
Because tears aren't the worst that can happen.
Oh no.
You remember that, too.
Things can get a lot worse than tears, and stay a lot worse for a long time, but you're afraid to think about that just yet.