Essays: Not My Favorite Things to Write

The following is an essay I wrote for my creative writing class. If you want you could assume that it's 100% true. If you really wanted to. If you read it and would prefer for it not to be true, you could assume that it's 100% not. I try to be accommodating. 

Grown Men Don't Cry

By Sir Matthew R. Fife

“It’s okay, he doesn’t have any feelings. Isn’t that right, Matt?” Brooke said.

            I sat there, trying to figure out how to respond. A million thoughts ran through my mind. I felt my face getting hot at the statement and all the previous comments said to belittle me. I knew what she wanted. An outburst. Something to show that what she had said had gotten to me.

            But I refused. To retaliate would show weakness, it would show that I cared what they thought. As the warm tears built in my eyes I fought them back with everything I had.

            With my emotions firmly in hand I replied, “That’s right.”

            There was a time in my life when an outburst would have been second nature. Tears came as naturally to me as eating or breathing. At the drop of a hat I would break down as if the end of the world had come, finding me unprepared. But I stopped.

            I don’t remember if there was a particular thought or moment when I decided that it was time to stay reserved. Growing up I kept to myself, spending hours on end with books, my only friends. No one wanted to hand out with a crybaby. By the time I was a young man I had put my childhood completely behind me, and with it my tearful ways.

            From then on it was a self-reinforcing cycle. Because I appeared in complete control and even-keeled, people would rely on me, seeking strength and comfort. The more people relied on me, the stronger and steadier I needed to be for them, and the more they would rely on me. No matter what I did I couldn’t break free, so I shackled my emotions more and more, becoming the absolute master of them, bending them to my will.

            So it wasn’t that I didn’t have emotions. Instead, I had controlled them so tightly and so completely that the more expressive and irrational of them had ceased to rebel. They plodded from day to day, eyes to the ground, broken and defeated. Sometimes when I wondered if they were still there they would bubble up, trying to force their way to the surface, and I would have to struggle against them to force them back into the corners of my soul to which they had been banished.

            I knew that they were part of me, but I did not think them important. Not then, at least.

            I was seventeen. My phone rang. On the other end of the line my girlfriend was sobbing, asking me to come over, to comfort her. To fulfill my assigned role. So I answered the call.

            When I arrived she threw herself into my arms, pulling me inside. Barney, the dog that was as old as she was, had finally reached the end. Due to an enormous amount of health problems ranging from tumors to blindness and everything in between, they had decided that there was no more need for further suffering. Barney was being put down that day.

            As I knelt on the ground beside him, one arm around my girlfriend, the other stroking Barney’s shaggy hair, the tears welled up from nowhere. The hot drops of sorrow overflowed onto my cheeks and dripped down the tip of my nose. I made no noise, simply crying silently next to my sobbing girlfriend.

            When the time came to load Barney into the back of the van to take him to the veterinarian, I pulled my tears back and stood firm, a pillar of strength to which my girlfriend clutched. The time for tears had passed, and the time to comfort others had come.

            Several months later my phone rang again. On the other end my girlfriend did not cry this time, but still requested that I come over. I thought nothing of it. She had just returned from a weeklong trip to Michigan and clearly wanted to see me.

            I first noticed that no one else was home when I stepped through the front door. Not normal, but not without precedent. I was greeted exuberantly by Gracie, her other dog that had just months before lost its best friend. Dogs have always found my company rather pleasant. I scratch heads very well.

            After disengaging me from Gracie, my girlfriend led me upstairs to her room, a place I had never gone nor wanted to go. It was the attic bedroom, a little tight, but cozy. It was a room filled with color, unlike the rest of her house. Most of the houses in the neighborhood all looked the same, leaving something to be desired in terms of aesthetic value, but this room was unlike anything else. It was comfortable.

            We sat on the edge of the bed as she told me she wanted to talk. She felt like our relationship had isolated her, keeping her from making friends. She also felt like that was my fault. I did not list off the friends that she did have regardless of dating me, though I desperately wanted to. IF my recollection still serves me like it should, she mentioned some other failings of mine before finally getting to the point. Our eight-month relationship had reached its end.

            By this point she was crying. Maybe the shock prevented it, maybe all the barriers I had erected inside my heart and mind helped, but no matter how much I wanted to, I could not cry. I had spent a significant amount of time with this girl, being more emotionally invested that I had ever been before. I just sat there, staring at the wall in front of me. I wouldn’t even look at her. She sat there beside me, facing me, silently pleading with me to react. Mustering up everything I could I managed to alter my breathing, put my head down, and squeeze out a tear or two from my unnaturally dry eyes.

            I remember saying sorry, but I’m still not sure what I was sorry about. Possibly the end of the relationship, for being smothering in her mind, or for not being able to react like she wanted me to.

            Somewhere, deep down, I know that I can still cry. I don’t know how it happens, or even why. Why should the end of the life of a dog that I had barely known affect me more than the end of one of the first significant romantic relationships of my life? I have never cried at the end of a relationship or the death of a loved one. When things break and end, I move on. Even when I sometimes wish I could unbreak what I’ve broken, when tears could be the salve that the wound desperately craves, when I want to mourn with those that mourn, I still cannot let the tears come to my eyes.

I’ve seen a lot of people cry in my lifetime of giving comfort and being an available shoulder and a pair of strong arms. I’ve lifted and strengthened and listened and helped and hugged. But emotional connection gets harder and harder with every passing moment. Somewhere in the back of my mind is a prison full of emotions begging to be fully released to run wild and free. But I am the listener, not the speaker. In my mind needing others would somehow weaken my ability to be needed.

Someone once said that grown men don’t cry. But maybe that should change. I can think of no reason why in order to be a real man one must be only emotionally receptive and never expressive. I can think of no reason why crying should be a sign of weakness. I can think of no reason why a grown man should be exactly like I am. Yet the prison doors remain barred. The chains remain strong and firmly in place. Somewhere in that deep place a part of me lies that I lost long ago, but I know if I unlock those doors I can never lock them again.

Even-keeled. Steady. Firmly under control. It’s all just another way of saying cold, distant, and inaccessible. Grown men don’t cry.