How to Cry

• Skin your knee.
• Listen to an old record on an old record player. Try “Little Deuce Coop” or “Starfish and Coffee” or “Village Ghetto Land.”
• Burn your tongue on your morning coffee, but tell no one. Keep it to yourself. Jam it down and don’t let it out. Wonder later why your tongue feels funny, like you burned it.
• Read a poem you wrote about your daughter who was at the beach a thousand miles away from you when you wrote it. She is in the next room right now doing homework. Ask how it’s going. See if you get an answer other than “fine.”
• Forget that you have tofu in the oven so it bakes down into little cubes of brown carbon. Swear quietly so that nobody hears you. But your daughter hears you. She always hears you.
• Eat a handful of Cheez-Its. Drink a tiny bottle of cooking wine. Let the dog out because she clearly has to pee, which reminds you of your other dog who never could wait, who would get up from her bed and make it halfway to the door before peeing in the kitchen.
• Swat at the insect flying around in the bedroom with a rolled up brochure for a time-share in Nelson, BC. You can’t be sure you got the insect because you can’t find the carcass. Tell everyone you got him anyway and go directly to bed.
• Comfort your son who says he’s afraid of when the dog will die some day. Hold him. Hold him so close that you’re afraid you might bruise him even though he doesn’t say it hurts. It hurts. Read to him. Read to him until he falls asleep no matter how long it takes for him to fall asleep. Keep reading even after he falls asleep. Leave the book near the bed. Make sure he’s covered up and make sure you always remember him like this. Make sure.
• Look at the calendar. There goes another day.
• Argue about the difference between thinking and feeling. Argue good-naturedly but secretly in your heart believe that thinking and feeling are so closely connected that they are inseperable. Think about feeling. Feel about thinking. Emotions are not actually in your heart. Thoughts are not actually in your brain. You can’t think your way out of this. You can’t feel your way into it. Just keep pushing forward and hope there’s a tomorrow.
• Watch a broadway musical about newsboys and when the kid with the bum leg turns out the light, be drawn in by the darkness even though this is just Disney doing what Disney does best, it is dark and noisy and crowded and freezing cold in this theater. Sink further down into your seat. Hold her hand. There where your fingers touch is the girl who was and who might have been and who is. Dammit. So cold.
• Spend an hour in a sushi restaurant with your family but don’t eat any of the sushi because you hate sushi. Try to ignore the TV in the restaurant. You cannot ignore the TV. It is just garbage on the TV but you can’t keep yourself from staring at it. There is nothing about this restaurant itself that you like except that you are here with your family. Go to the restroom. Touch the bare concrete wall outside the restroom and discover that it is not actually concrete. Nothing is real.
• Feed the lizard. Examine her for mites. Ask yourself it is possible to love a lizard. Ask yourself if you love this lizard. Look at her. Hold her. She is cold. She is a lizard.
• Check Google to see how far Baltimore is from Spokane. Memorize the exact mileage to Johns Hopkins University. By car it is 2,501 miles. According to Google. It is hard to imagine more than a few miles in a row. It is hard to imagine much beyond the walls of the house, which seem to be closing in on you.
• Listen to a podcast. Listen to a Radiotopia podcast because these are the ones most likely to make you feel something. They are the most likely to make a connection with something inside of you.
• Go into the bathroom and lock the door and turn off the lights and turn on the fan and run the water in the sink and lean against the sink and press your hands against your face. Imagine yourself the water, the air. Imagine yourself both inside and outside yourself. Imagine the specificity of imagination it would take to keep yourself from drowning. Remember how to hold an infant, how to extricate yourself from the arms of a sleeping child, how to dive into a pool of freezing cold water.
• Don’t wait. Do it now.