poetry
It was when fish became terrestrial amphibians that the body’s lacrimal system first evolved.71 We left the water and began to weep the home we’d abandoned.
Heather Christle • The Crying Book
The car is a private crying area. If you see a person crying near a car, you may need to offer help. If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held.
Heather Christle • The Crying Book
We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think
Ray Nayler • The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel
“I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real,” writes Robert Desnos to his beloved, “I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.”
Heather Christle • The Crying Book
“Our blues
assume you understand
not much, and try to be alive, just as we do,
and that it may be helpful to hold the hand
of someone as lost as you.”
-Kim Addonizio “Mortal Trash”
Empathy can be a hole through which one falls into despair. Tears make the ground slippery. And then what? Satisfaction for the depth of one’s feeling? If I am not myself in danger, then my imagining myself into the place of another’s suffering unnecessarily incapacitates me, makes me unable to move some small part of my day in a direction that
... See moreHeather Christle • The Crying Book
We love through connection, but we individualize through solitude.
David Richo • How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly
The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.