You’re age five and fall off your bike and scrape your knee so you start to cry. And mommy says, “Suck it up, big boys don’t cry.“
You’re age six and hyperactive and sent to a mental institution for kids. You’re scared and alone and afraid of the dark and want to go home. You sit in your room and cry, but your roommate punches you and says, “Only girls cry!“
You’re age eight and it’s the one year anniversary of being in foster care and you hate everyone around you, sitting in your room with frustrated tears streaming down your face. Your foster dad comes in and sees you, then takes you over his knee to spank the wuss out of you, because by now you should know that boys don’t cry.
You’re age nine and things are going fine living back with your mom but her boyfriend is mean and doesn’t like you so when he breaks your favorite toy in punishment the frustration spills over and you hit someone for the first time.
But then he hits you back and nothing has ever hurt so bad and when the tears spring into your eyes he laughs and then asks, “I thought you already knew that only little girls cried?“
You’re eleven in another group home and never call home. You’re angry at the world so you keep to yourself and only find friends in books, and when your buddy Darryl from The Outsiders dies it feels like a knife in your chest. You put the book down and cry and just then the counselor walks in and notices so he calls you a bitch, and then walks away.
You’re thirteen and haven’t cried in two years and anytime someone looks at you funny you lash out with fists and words designed to tear them up just like you’ve been torn apart inside.
You’re fifteen and learn what heartbreak is for the first time because she couldn’t stand that you’re emotionally crippled. She wants you to be sensitive but the only emotions you know are anger and rage. So she leaves and you add a third emotion, frustration.
You’re seventeen and in love and it’s great but you don’t know how to communicate because everything you feel is overwhelming and if you dwell on it your eyes get watery but men don’t cry and you can’t cry because that would make you a bitch. So you clamp down harder on your already ruined emotions and break up with someone else who wants what you can’t provide.
You’re still seventeen and your grandfather who you’ve only known for three years passes away and it feels like you’re dying inside and can’t express it so the pain leaks out the only way it can in the form punched in windows and broken walls.
You also learn that there’s this great numbing drink called alcohol.
You’re eighteen living halfway across the world because you had to get away but you spend all your time missing your friends and music doesn’t help anymore so you take your frustrations out on the bottle, drinking a little earlier every day.
You’re nineteen and full of piss and vinegar, but mostly whiskey, and everyone around you thinks you’re weird for being drunk all the time. You spiral into yourself and write your sorrows out on paper but instead of it being cathartic you feel the need to drink some more.
You’re twenty years old and the last three years have been an endless parade of disappointment and failure. You wander the streets looking for fights and finding them, and the only time you feel alive anymore is when you’re getting a fist smashed into your face and returning the favor.
You’re not quite twenty one when the call comes and over the phone you hear that the only man you’ve ever loved was driving home on his motorcycle but he never made it. And for the first time in five years you want to cry, but don’t know how.
Now you’re twenty one living on an island in an isolated camp and the isolation is what you crave. You spend your days cooking for a living and when the night falls you crack open a bottle or two and stare at the wall. You’ve wanted to cry every time you look at a picture of him but the only thing that comes up is a sea of hurt and rage and anger and despair and frustration, but your eyes remain dry.
You’re twenty two and lost. No cares for the future because the only concern is getting more booze to wash away the desire to never wake up in the morning. After another day of back-breaking labor you stumble upstairs and continue your favorite pass-time of staring at the wall for hours consuming bottle after bottle after bottle.
The thought strikes you that there’s no point to anything in a world where you can’t be who you are, and in a fit of inspiration you open your fancy knife roll and pull out the seven inch stainless steel serrated utility knife. It seems like the easiest thing in the world to just drag it across your skin.
The realization hits of what you’re actually contemplating and after throwing the knife away you throw the bottle down too. All at once all of the loneliness and depression and anger surges up and before you know it there are fat tears rolling down and staining your shirt.
Silent cries at first but then it builds in intensity and soon enough you’re screaming your rage at the world. The screams go on forever, ringing in your ears. Screaming because you don’t know how to sob.
You keep crying because you’re afraid you’ll never be able to again. You cry for every past version of you who wasn’t allowed to cry. You cry in defiance of every person who told you it wasn’t ok to cry. You cry for all the years you wanted to cry but didn’t know how. You cry for all the broken dreams and lost opportunities that you should have cried about before. You cry because maybe boys and men don’t cry, but the broken child inside of you is allowed to cry, and DAMMIT, he wants to cry. He just wants to cry.
Now he just doesn’t know how to stop.
So this was written when I was 26 and still coming to terms with my gender identity, and I decided to leave the pronouns as they were when written. Besides, there isn’t really a stigma against queer agender folk crying, so replacing all the pronouns wouldn’t have the same impact. Plus despite the fact that I’m not a man, and don’t use he/him pronouns, I was socialized as one and these were my real feelings at the time.