Two months ago, I was leaving a Superstore at night, listening to Stevie Nicks, sat down at the bus stop with my four grocery bags claiming the entire plastic bench, and cried.
Not because I had just finished shopping at Superstore, or because of Stevie Nicks, or because I was carrying four grocery bags by myself and had spent four grocery bags worth of money on groceries. But I cried. I changed playlists and listened to Sean Paul. I cried some more, despite being assured as I was going to get it hot like a sauna.
I can admit I was feeling lonely--I had basically broken up with someone I was not ready to break up with and had no one to blame but myself. Things felt different. I felt different, and I wasn't used to feeling that kind of different just because somebody was gone.
These are not tips for not crying in public. These are not tips for crying in public, either, I would like that to be especially clear. This is just an account of me: crying in public.
The bus and I have started doing this a lot. I don't seem to cry just anywhere. It is always in relation to the bus. I cry on the bus, I cry just getting off the bus, before the bus, after the bus, in the bus shuttle, at the terminal, sitting underneath the inscrutable local public transport sign--some way or another, the bus becomes a part of the crying. The bus is, for the time being, essential to the crying. It is when I get on the bus in particular that I am provoked to think about something I don't really want to acknowledge I still think about. It is then my eyes blink and burn.
Now there are roads that make me sad. Sidewalks, photographs, celebrities, restaurants, tattoo parlors, Spotify playlists, lipsticks, underwear. These things, public and private and somewhere in between, have made me cry, too.
I am not a doctor, so I lack both the background and the authority to tell you why I am so defenseless to that nicely-packaged tube of lipstick that it stayed intentionally tucked away in the un-used, zippable pouch in my purse for two weeks, or why just one street my bus route crosses five out of seven days of the week still makes my shoulders tense when the stop is announced over the P.A. speaker. As a human, and one who is fairly capable of sending herself in circles with the glories of a Web M.D. search, I have known for some time now that I have anxiety. This is relevant to clarify that I have cried because of anxiety in public before, certainly--but that kind of crying is different. This kind of crying in public does not start because your brain is irrationally thinking: What if they can hear me breathing as I'm walking? What if my footsteps are too loud? What if they think I'm following them even though we're both just going in the same direction? What if -- and so on. This is the kind of crying where you try to look over the pile of fallen leaves resting on the hill, but the bus keeps moving, and you can't see the leaves anymore, and now you miss the leaves, but you don't want to miss the leaves because you know the leaves don't miss you.
When I prefaced this post, I emphasized that this was not a guide for crying in public. And while I still stand by that promise of effort, I cannot deny that I have questions about what it might mean to cry in public. Explicitly, with the bus as our public forum, crying certainly feels appropriate. Like anyone who is used to using public transit, buses specifically can be uncomfortable, unpersonable, desensitizing spaces. Sometimes, there is not enough room for everyone to have a seat on the bus. You might spend thirty minutes on a bus with a stranger's backpack invading the barrier of personal space that is owed to you, as you determine the best rhythm for bobbing your head and torso to avoid a collision between their water bottle and the bridge of your nose. In those moments, it is arguably easier to not cry with all the strategic thought required to maintain that sense of personal space. But what happens when I do cry on the crowded or empty, smelly or unscented, uncomfortable or tolerable bus?
In questioning what it means to cry in public, it is probably useful to define what crying in public is. Is crying in public a person in any non-private space shedding visible, tangible tears? Is crying in public biting your lip in the bathroom stall where no one can see you? Is crying in public standing at on literal or metaphorical platform and asking the people around you to do something, but there are no tears and you are not crying? It might be all of them, and it might be none. For me, crying in public has become rolling my eyes at sentimental season changes and covering my ears at the third to last stop on my bus route. For now, crying in public is something vulnerable and all at once, whether intentional or not, released.
So, if we understand the public cry as a vulnerable thing turned vulnerable act, perhaps it is time to understand (or, at least, try to understand) what the public crier might be. As the crier, in what ways do I jeopardize the public integrity of the bus? Am I invading the sanctity of the shared object that is public transport when I cry, as the stranger's backpack does when intruding upon me and my personal space? Does crying make the bus less public, or make it more mine? Not really. Plenty people cry in plenty of public spaces plenty often, and it hasn't stopped those spaces from being public in use or name. Of course, it is important to remember who the public bus is public to: in St. Catharines, where I have been crying most recently, the bus's public is someone with a student card or three dollars to spare. The public is never such a self-evident category. Pretending that it is, of course, because that is something I have the comfort of doing as a member of this public, I am asking: are my tears capable of disrupting the integrity of the bus's public space-ness?*
This far into the game, I would say maybe they are not so powerful. If I do the public crying well enough (read: discreetly), I, the crier, may well be capable of maintaining the equilibrium of what is public and what is private. Perhaps, the public crier is of no concern to the bus's credibility of public-ness so long as it remains invisible. If the public cry is invisible to the rest of the public, it does not threaten the illusion for the individuals on the bus attempting to claim a temporal space of their own--a seat, a handrail, a hanging pulley--until the vehicle of the public space has served its purpose for them. That illusion of personal space in the public place is important, and it is possible that if the public crier cries visibly, the rest of the public will find themselves confronted once again with the reality of the shared object that is the public bus. Crying in public is uncomfortable. And when people feel uncomfortable, the illusion is broken. This is what I am trying to get at--what I have only just barely explored.
At a time like this, asking myself questions I have no intention of truly answering, I think of bell hooks' ethics of love. hooks proposes love as a rhetorical tool to challenge dominion, as power.* Love is not idealist or romanticized; it is a fortitude of consideration and criticism that actively looks at and makes visible the individual it is engaging with. As hooks' love is given the potential of agency, I wonder: can my tears be a rhetorical tool? Can tears be power? I have seen many people cry (in person, on the news, and the silver screen), and often their tears have moved me to my own. I have seen many, many tears, and rarely have they sat on eyelashes passively. Tears tumble, and spill, and fall, and blur, and stifle, and burn, and align, and return, and discomfort, and ruin. There is agency in these tears I have wiped away and endured, these ducts which refute obedience, and yet we so often call them weak. I look at these tears, both visible and invisible, and wonder why, on the public bus or anywhere else that they should be rendered as weakness, as a folly of my composure.
There is one last thing I will say: as the leaves continue to change, and the lipstick is retrieved and returned from my purse, and as the street names become less familiar, and I count the stops with less accuracy, I will continue to cry in public. Whether I mean to or not, it will happen. Someday, I hope to master the public cry--in power.
*While I did not have the room or the capacity to quote her directly, this very small, non-exhaustive exploration of "public space-ness" was directly in line with Honig's concept of public thing-ness, and it is important to credit her influence on my organized ranting here. For more on things and publics (and democracies), you can read her lectures Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair.
*This may be an informal blog where I regurgitate things I vaguely remember, but citations are important! More on hooks' culture of love in her text All About Love. Also, blogs do not have any functions for creating endnotes, and they really should if I am going to continue writing one...
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