Day 119 - Crying Story

Crying Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Vick sat in his car, parked in the parking lot with a hamburger stand on one side and an all-natural organic produce store on the other. The irony of the location was not lost on him. He had thought about this location many many times, and shopped at both before, sometimes on the same day. But that was not his concern tonight. Tonight, Vick sat and looked across the street at the small bungalow home with the “For Sale” sign in the front yard.

Vick was not the type of man that cried often and almost never in public. But here he sat in his car and cried and cried and cried. It was night. The stores were closed. The house across the street was empty. There was no one to witness his emotional breakdown.

Vick didn’t cry in public, but he had always been able to cry when people fell in love on a TV show or when someone died in a movie. He just couldn’t do it in real everyday ordinary life.  He reasoned things out in his own life. He was clinical, analytical. Some people thought he was stoic or Spartan. A former love had called him ascetic as an insult, but he took it with pride. He felt the emotions too often got in the way of doing what needed to be done. He acknowledged the premise that there was some value in emotional release, which was why he usually allowed for it in private, but he wanted to keep it to himself. He didn’t want opinions or judgments or other people seeing anything at all. It wasn’t a fear of letting people in; it was a fear of them not being worth let in.

He thought he might set fire to the house. That wouldn’t solve anything, but it would destroy the house. The house wasn’t to blame. Even if the house did see him crying, it certainly couldn’t offer any judgments. He knew that. He wasn’t one of those that believed that inanimate objects were alive. He didn’t think that there was such a thing as a spirit and even if there were, he knew it didn’t rub off on the places people lived. He knew that. He knew it. But he still wanted to burn that house to the ground. It had seen too much. It had existed through too much. It had been meant to be the beginning and foundation of a whole world, a whole life. Instead it was empty and on the market. He wasn’t worried about losing money, although after the latest housing market bubble burst there was no way in the world for him to recover his investments. He hadn’t bought the house to make money and he wasn’t selling the house to make money. He was selling the house to kill the memories that had existed in the house. The house was to be the future, but the future was dead. Selling the house could kill the memories, but quite possibly, burning it to the ground could kill them too. And burning the house might feel a whole lot better.

It wasn’t like he had gasoline and matches in the trunk of his car. It wasn’t like that at all. But the thought had occurred to him.

Life was cold and harsh and unloving and it all made him want to feel sedated. He was tired of feeling this way and tired of not knowing how to make it end. In the past he had been good at practicing a sort of thought lobotomy. He could shut himself down and turn off the thoughts. It kept the demons at bay. It kept the emotions locked up. It kept the tears dry.

Tonight was one of those nights where no trick or tactic was going to work. Tonight was just sad songs on the radio and broken dreams and the reminders of a future lost. Tonight he was parked across from his house. Tonight he tried to stay hidden in the shadows, just in case anyone was indeed watching. Tonight was time for tears.