My title pretty much says it all. The last few days, everything and anything makes me cry and it doesn’t matter what it is. Tears of joy? Had them. Tears of sadness? Check. Tears of disbelief? Strolled down these cheeks. I’ve even started crying without knowing why. Just standing outside, looking upon the world, tears streaming down my face.
I mean, my small dog started cleaning my medium-sized dog’s eyes and ears, which she does a couple times a day, and all the sudden I needed a tissue. Then I saw a picture of Michelle Obama and it was full waterworks.
Okay, that last part isn’t entirely unusual but whatever…..
I remember back to the 2017 eclipse. I don’t know what I expected, but I know it wasn’t much. I was kind of flabbergasted that so many people were traveling so far to get to the totality zone (which I live in). At the time I thought it was kind of ridiculous.
But then the day came and I was transported out of a world of stoicism and into a world of wonder. As the air got cooler and the sky got darker, the atmosphere changed and I felt it in my body. When it felt like dusk at mid-morning, I felt like a little girl on the night of Christmas Eve again. That overwhelming feeling of “what’s going to happen? What will it be like?” made me feel small again.
(And now I’m crying as I remember that day.)
When totality happened it blew my mind in a way I’ll never quite be able to explain. I felt dizzy and weightless, insignificant but more alive than I’ve ever been. Afterwards, as the sun suddenly peeked back around the moon, I realized how cold I was, and how I always seem to have words to describe something but I had absolutely nothing to describe what I’d just witnessed.
Everyone that I was with was in as much awe as I was but they were speaking, adrenaline pumping, commenting on what they’d just seen.
I wanted to say something, too, but I couldn’t find the words. And I felt like anything I said would somehow, at best, minimize what I’d just witnessed and, at worst, be disrespectful of it.
So while we were back to the dusk-like feeling, I quietly walked back to my apartment, sat down on my couch, and sobbed.
Up until that point I had never in my life cried tears of awe, but I will always remember the feeling of having no other response.
And I guess that this last month has been a really long repeat/replay of that feeling. Being witness to something so utterly surreal and powerful and being unable to summon the words to describe it. Knowing that this is one for the history books and, when I need them the most, my words fail to document how incredibly powerful it is to walk on empty sidewalks. To drive on empty streets. To see only the top half of a familiar face and struggle to remember what their smile looks like.
To not see my family. To get a wild hair and decide to go out of town for the night and have dinner and drinks, but have absolutely nowhere to go. To cancel what I want to do for my birthday. To not go play a game of pool just because it sounds nice to drink a beer in a dim room and do something.
To sit on my patio and hear no traffic, see very few people. To hear the helicopter above and start crying again because we all know what that helicopter means.
To hear that my coworker is sick, and we don’t know anything else besides that.
When every door handle could be a death sentence to the most vulnerable. When I could be the conduit through which that door handle exacts its vengeance.
It is a lot like watching two heavenly bodies move across each others path and completely change the world we lived in for a minute. The way we see things, the way we process information, the way we simply stand in our yards or on our sidewalks.
Sometimes things like that happen.
And six months ago I would have told you that I’d document every day of something so big that it upended the way we live our very lives.
But it turns out it’s so big I can’t wrap my words around it, so instead I just cry a whole lot and hope that someday I’ll be able to write about how I feel.
That someday this will all make sense.
But for today, and tomorrow, and next week, I think I’ll just let myself cry.