[11-18-25] You Can't Just Cry Because You Have Interesting Testicles
I woke up this morning and I felt like crying, except I didn’t, because I don’t ever really cry.
But boy howdy, did I feel like it. When I woke up my vision was blurry: like how a newborn baby sees, probably. My phone’s clock told me that I didn’t get the 8 hours that the sleep authorities told me I needed to get. That made me want to cry, except I didn’t: you can’t cry just because you’re cranky and regretful of how you spent your time the night before.
Nia stirred next to me, the sunlight streamed in through her curly, sleep-matted hair. She lay on top of me, and I felt her weight. For a brief moment, her weight turned metaphoric and I felt her reliance on me; I peered into the abyss where my indecision lay and turned my head to see Nia there holding my hand. That made me want to cry, but except I didn’t, you can’t just cry just because you feel a bit of pressure.
But I stretched out and thought “boy how nice would it be to cry,” since I haven’t cried in so long and whenever I tried to all I got was a quivering lip and a teardrop if I was lucky. Maybe it’s like how when you eat lots of junk food, your arteries get clogged and its harder for blood to get through, you know? Maybe I clogged my tear-ducts somehow by focusing on turning my feelings into actions, like when something’s happening to you or you put yourself in a situation, instead of just letting them be feelings.
Seems like I held them back too much, and maybe that will work for me while I’m young, but holding them back that much is sure to lead to incontinence in my old age. Then I’ll be some sad crying old guy, feeding pigeons in the park and sobbing to himself with a smile since he can’t get the tears to stop flowing. Thinking of myself as an old guy, that makes me want to cry but you can’t cry just because you’re going to grow old otherwise we’d all be crying all the time.
All I know for sure is that whenever I feel like crying, a wave rushes from the pit of my stomach all the way to my throat. Then it feels real tight, like my throat is blocking the wave by choking me. Then the big wave turns into a trickle, and that trickle turns into a pouty lip or sometimes it turns into anger. When it turns into anger, the hand in my throat lets go, except now it feels like the water is coming from somewhere else. It doesn’t feel like the murky, salty, foaming wave rising from the pit of my stomach to drain itself haplessly and formlessly into the open air. Instead, I redirect it, I put it all into a tank and pressurize it to shoot out whatever I’ve got. This water is hot and sterile and it feels like a hose with a thumb over it. It burns and the pain makes me want to cry which, of course, I don’t.
Instead of letting out the wave from the pit, I let it slosh around for a few more years, hoping that somebody will die so I can have an excuse to let it out, finally. Of course, you can’t cry just because a mysterious brine rises through you, you’ve gotta wait for somebody to die and then its ok. Then the plugs come out or the pipes get flushed out or whatever.
Like when my grandmother died, it was ok to wail for hours on end in my room alone until I drifted off to sleep. Everyone agreed that was ok, I didn’t have to ask, people seemed very supportive of me crying all day in my room. And at the funeral when we buried her, people seemed supportive there too. Some of them were also letting the wave out and wailing in a chorus into the wind. That felt good. Well, actually, it was awful but it was awful in a way that felt good.
I noticed that it’s never so hard for the women in my life to let it out, you know, the tears and everything. They are always able to cry when things are hard, and then hard things get easier, unless they cry too much then it gets harder. But I think for me it would get easier, probably.
Maybe some of my tear ducts got tangled around in my testicles and that’s why it’s so hard for me to cry. A doctor once felt at my testicles and said “oh, interesting,” you know like a doctor does, like you’re not even a human like you’re some cadaver or something, which scared me until she calmly responded “no its just all tangled up in here, it’s not a big deal, I’ve just never seen the veins all tangled up quite like that.” It made me self-conscious to think my testicles were interesting.
Maybe its my interesting testicles that are making it hard to cry, maybe lots of guys have interesting testicles too so they can’t let it all out because the pipes in their testicles are too small. Maybe for girls it goes through big tubes, you know the fallopian ones, and that’s why they can let the wave out.
That makes me want to cry, but of course I’m not going to, you can’t cry just because you have interesting testicles.