It was 9pm last Wednesday night and I was crying in a booth at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. I pushed at the corners of my eyes with my knuckles and dabbed the snot leaking from my nose with a napkin. The edges of my vision blurred with tears, like a watery postcard. At the center of the postcard, still surprisingly in focus, sat my friend.
I get ugly when I cry. My entire face turns blotchy and red. The salt stings my nostrils. My eyes puff up, causing me to look more Asian than my usual fifty percent. My nose swells. My eyelids start to itch. The corners of my mouth dry out. I can’t breathe through my nose.
I try to avoid crying in public, mostly because of the ugliness and the sluggish way the signs of it fade from my face. I feel marked long after the impulse to weep has gone. As a kid, my dad would call me “red eyes” as I sat at the dinner table, unable to hide the signs.
I’ve locked myself in countless stalls in countless bathrooms at countless churches, waiting for the telltale puffiness to leave my eyes, giving the all clear.
I’ve always felt shame at any strong display of emotion.
I have a good memory too, for emotions and things. How do I know this? Because when I say to a friend or family member, “Remember when such-and-such happened?” or “Remember when you said this-or-that?” they almost never remember. For example, my sister doesn’t remember the hurtful things I said to her when we were eleven, but I do. I remember the emotional charge of hate, fear and pain.
My dad recently told me, “When you were little, you would burst out crying at the dinner table because of some promise Mom or I had made to you months ago.”
It’s like I was born to hold grudges, to internalize forever the hurt and unmet expectations of the moment: “You wounded me on this day, at this hour, wearing this blue shirt.”
Last Tuesday night, I had a dream that my sister was telling me that it was over between us. There was no yelling, no screaming, just calm, rational argument. She was making several very valid points: I had said this. Done that. Sure, it was in the past, but still the facts were there and the only logical step would be to cut ties.
I dreamt this, knowing my sister. I dreamt this, knowing that she would never reject me. Never. In the dream, I felt numb.
My dad and I had a fight about a year ago that ended in my tears. And honestly, I despised myself for crying. I hated the vulnerability of it.
And sitting there in that booth, in Canter’s, on Fairfax, in Los Angeles—all I could see was how I needed to forgive myself. That it was okay to be hurt, okay to remember, okay to cry.
Perhaps God made me this way for a reason. Perhaps it’s part of being a writer—this emotionally fraught memory of mine.
I looked across the booth at my friend. All I could see in her eyes was empathy. I was crying, but I felt no shame.
