It starts in your chest and pushes its way up your throat and into your nose, which gets kind of runny. Then it's in your head and behind your eyes, which get nice and shiny. Your cheeks feel heavy and your eyebrows scrunch up and your lips curve downward and one, the bottom one, sticks out farther than normal. The bags under your eyes turn redder, and it may stop there, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you can feel the wetness and the sadness and then you can't see, you blink, you blink again until the wetness overflows onto your cheek or nose and down over your lips or under your chin. Sometimes its only a few drops that you don't bother to wipe away because they feel right in the moment, and sometimes you stick out your tongue to taste the salt, lick it right from the top corners or your lips. Sometimes it streams, leaving desolate little trails in its wake, paths of desertion on your cheeks. Your throat closes up and its difficult to breath if it comes hard enough, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it stops after a bit. Sometimes you can't stop. Sometimes you can't control it. You try to stop, try to shrink back in and dry up all by yourself, but then you get those sharp, small upward gasps that you can't tell are coming, but almost always come in threes. It's hard to think, but you still manage, only messy, dangerous thoughts, though. You have to sniff hard and sometimes you employ the use of your sleeve under your nose or your hands for your cheeks or under your eyes. Your eyes get puffy and stay like that for a while. That may be it. That may be all there is to it. Sometimes it isn't, sometimes it's much worse. Your pain comes out in sobs a low moan and then a shuddering wail that changes pitch a lot and just makes the droplets come harder. You need to grab something, to muffle the noise, to numb the pain; it's hard to do that. It's a private thing; no one is supposed to hear you. You can bang your fists or ball them up on some piece of fabric, you can hug a stuffed animal, throw things and feel them break, like everything else seems to be breaking inside you, or pray or whisper to yourself, tell yourself to buck up, but you are out of control. It's out of your hands. That's why heroes don't cry, they can't be in control, they can't be weak, or maybe they just can't cry. You just never know.
