Dry-Eyed Daisies
       Naomi Krupitsky Wernham
       January 18, 2008    4th period


       She had never cried.
       She could make tears come out of her eyes; she could
make her mouth twist and stretch; she could make
moaning, sobbing hiccups; she could appear to be
wracked with an inexpressible grief.  But she couldn’t
cry, because true crying happens to you. She had once
read about the sublime -- a beauty touched with
sadness, a tragic, full gorgeousness, and she had
always pictured crying in this way. She couldn’t
abandon herself to anything. To cry required a certain
amount of abandon to forces unseen, and she spent her
whole life trying to see them.
       She had almost cried innumerable times.
       When she scraped her knee falling off the jungle gym
in second grade, the little bits of asphalt ground
into her torn-up kneecap seemed to be connected
directly to her tear ducts. Her throat was filled with
a lump that squeezed fat, wet drops out of her eyes,
and she opened her mouth, engaging her vocal cords in
a pitiful howl that seemed appropriate.
       “It’s not that bad, dear, it’s really not so bad,”
came the gentle coo of some playground attendant or
another.
       She made more noise to show that no, it really was
that bad, and the woman picked her up, disbelieving.
       In seventh grade she sat in her room, memories
echoing in her head. “Did you see what she was
wearing? What a slut!” New on barely-teenage lips, the
word had spilled out of their mouths, deliciously
forbidden. She had hidden, silent, in her stall,
watching their feet shuffle in front of the mirror,
chewing on her thumbnail. Hours later, she sat in the
corner, hurting from the inside out, her sobbing
rendered inadequate by inexplicably dry eyes.
       Even as a baby, her crying had served too much of a
purpose to legitimize itself. She was hungry, she was
tired, her diaper was soiled. She was sick of
cheek-pinching. It was always her choice; it always
made sense; the tears and the noise came when it was
convenient. She screamed and tears fell, but she never
cried.
* * *
       This year, she was falling in love. She thought she
was, anyways, and that was good enough.
       She spent days lost, floating through the kinds of
daydreams she had yearned after in movies, but never
really understood. She had made fun of them, laughing
at the fields and flowers as soft as featherbeds and
thin white clothing that caught, lingering at the
edges of golden wheat stems, and waves that lapped at
warm beach sands. Now, that was all she felt. It was
all she had, all she wanted, all she could understand.

       At night, she flung herself across the bed, smiling,
a phone cord twirling around her finger and hair
falling across her face as she laughed softly and
rolled onto her back. She kicked sock-clad feet
together and watched their shadows on her wall. She
pressed her lips to the receiver, because with eyes
closed and fantasies freed, the plastic was as soft
and giving as his mouth. She felt herself dissolved,
slipping through time and space and phone lines to a
place where there were only the two of them.
       “I miss you.” She took his words and kept them,
balled up in a small niche somewhere near her heart,
and felt them enter a space she had not known was
empty, a space she had not known needed to be filled.
       “I miss you, too,” she breathed, relishing the
syllables’ journey through her mouth.
       And then they laughed together, hiccuping joy
rolling, synchronized, because they had seen each
other two hours ago and it was longer than either of
them could stand.
       Life became simultaneously more and less bearable;
time seemed to flux and pass at varying, surreal
speeds. The trees that bent in the wind carried secret
messages that saluted Them and their newness, flowers
bloomed purely for the purpose of watching her glide
by. Blue was bluer, white was brighter. Food was
unnecessary because in the beginning, warmth is
sustenance; anything more would fill her to bursting.
Thoughts of crying had disappeared, shoved into a
cold, unnecesary void where sadness existed. Far from
her, far from Them.
       They talked. About nothing, about everything; they
couldn’t remember their conversations, but late at
night, memories of whispered infatuation would sneak
through windowsills, permeating their bedrooms with
reasons to get up in the morning. They had moved away
from their origins, invented a plane of existence upon
which there was only Them. They were lost there, and
making each other up as they went along. They consumed
one another, and it wasn’t sustainable, and they
didn’t notice or care.
* * *
       She hadn’t told him her secret, though. And it was
crawling around at night, haunting her, convincing her
that her omission was deception. She couldn’t sleep.
Her secret chastised her, sternly breaking through
daydreams and gnawing unrelentingly at her conscience.

       “I have to tell you something,” she whispered one
night, cupping the phone with one hand and twirling
the cord with an unprecedented anxiety. Her heart
echoed in her ears and her stomach swirled, a bitter
lurching and contracting catching at her breath. He
wasn’t going to believe her. She was a freak and he
would hate her. She hadn’t reached a place of knowing
he wouldn’t. Theirs was a fragile feeling, gusting
like wind does down a narrow alley but subject to
change; it wasn’t yet strong and she did not know what
would happen and felt sickened.
       “You can tell me anything.” His curious insistence
did nothing to help her state of mind. He was nice
now, but he wouldn’t believe her. He wouldn’t
understand. Everything depended on him knowing, on
them both understanding.
       “I --.” She stopped. She wasn’t ready. She was stuck.
She couldn’t not tell; she’d be forever stuck in
sleepless denial and he would know. But she couldn’t
tell; she couldn’t move past the place where they were
in unison, where it was perfect, where flowers bloomed
for their incandescent, looming comprehension of one
another.
       “Please tell me.”  His voice was soft. She wanted to
rest, paused, lifted on the cloud of that voice.
       She waited for time to freeze so she wouldn’t have to
speak.
       It didn’t.
       And she didn’t know where the strength was coming
from but as time plowed insistently on, going its
normal speed for the first time since they had become
Them, she felt the words she needed forming beneath
her diaphragm. Breath sorted itself into consonants
and syllables and spaces between and steadied, waiting
for her open mouth, waiting for an exit. She hated the
words and the change they would bring. She wasn’t
ready.
       She let them come anyway, up through her chest. Up.
They lay waiting, expectant at the back of her throat.
It was time.
       “I’ve never cried.”
       There was a pause between her confession and his
comprehension that weighed immeasurably upon her soul.
       “What do you mean?” he asked. He couldn’t tell if she
was serious. His tone was carefully neutral so as not
to incriminate himself by guessing her intentions
incorrectly.
       She could talk now. She had flown somewhere where
self-analysis did not exist. She did not feel the
words forming before they came out. She was not
worried. She was completely calm. She was unnaturally
sure of herself.
       “I mean exactly what I said. I’ve never cried.”
       “But you have to have cried.”
       Logic. Her calm began to crumble, dust falling as her
defenses shifted from the inside out. She was not so
self-assured. They would break; They would crumble. He
wouldn’t understand.
       “When you were a baby, at least. Everyone cries.”
       “No.” She willed herself not to panic. “There are
tears and there is noise but there is not crying.”
       “I don’t understand.”
       Those words tore viciously into her very core,
seizing her fragile trust in Them with snapping jaws,
breaking everything she knew.
       She had been consumed by a deluded certainty that he
knew, that They knew, that most importantly They both
understood, everything could be understood, and this
discrepancy ripped a deep fissure between Them.
       She couldn’t let him not understand, but she couldn’t
explain; she couldn’t face his confusion; he couldn’t
be confused by her, it was too big. She was lost; she
was choking. It shouldn’t be this big, she knew it
shouldn’t matter this much, she never could have known
that until he said ‘I don’t understand’.
       Her perspective had widened. She had realized that
the rest of the world still existed and she was
drowning in it, jerked violently out of the place They
had created.
       The phone slipped out of her trembling hand onto the
bed. It was wet. She tried to breathe, in and out, in
and out, tried to calm down, tried to figure out how
to fix Them, tried to understand how three words had
broken Them, but her breath was coming in shudders,
snagging on a lump in her throat, triggering an open,
wounded sound like an animals’ howling, shuddering,
shaking, wet phone from wet face and she did not want
to be crying now, she couldn’t, he wouldn’t understand
but she couldn’t stop it and lost and cried. And cried
and cried and was crying so she did not hear his
desperate, tinny voice through the receiver, “Hello?
Hello? Are you okay? Did I do something?” She cried.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you, hello?”
Tears leaked out of her aching eyes in mini
waterfalls, cascading onto her forearms and winding
through her fine hairs onto the cotton bedspread.
“Please answer me, I’m so sorry, what can I do?” Her
very core convulsed, shaking and pushing the sobs out
of her.
* * *
       He had eventually become angry with her, wishing she
would just stop fucking crying and tell him what was
wrong. He had hung up his end of the phone. When she
stopped crying, eyes leaky and aching and body cold
and trembling with emptied grief, all she heard was
the monotonous dial tone. ‘Your call cannot be
completed at this time. If you would like to make a
call, please hang up and try again.’ She would not
like to make a call. She was empty, hollow, and
completely relieved in spite of everything; she wanted
only to sleep; her eyes stung and were swollen and
drifted together and it was dark. She slept soundly,
still sprawled across her bed in jeans, the phone
still on, resting with drying teardrop splashes next
to her.
        ...Beep...beep...beep...If you would like to make a
call....
* * *
       The two of them were never the same again. They
existed in seperate places. The fissure remained; they
built tremulous, delicate bridges over it, but it
never closed. They were friends, and they cared about
one another with a bittersweet nostalgia. They had
taken no precautions; they had made no allowances for
differences between them, and because of this, they
were unable to be Them once the difference was
revealed. They could not exist together and in the
world at the same time. They had no regrets, although
sometimes, walking home from school, she would pass
daisies and think of the dreamlike days when the
daisies had been for her, when the sky had been bluer
and the phone lay waiting, expecting her fingers’
caress, her laughters’ echo.
       And sometimes, when the sky had grown dark and the
stars emerged and the moon began its slow journey
through the cool sky, she would lie on her bed and
watch tears drift down from her cheeks, wondering
about the achy-eyed relief that she knew would come.
Wondering if she had solved anything with these tears.