This Boy Doesn't Cry

The rain crashes down upon him with a seemingly icy indifference. He saw it through the dirty lens of a neglected window. He supposes that the window is his now. As much as a window can belong to anyone. He feels no ownership over anything in the world around him. He’s doing all he can to own himself, but he doesn’t know whether he can. There are forces greater than him. Variations on the gravity that cleaves him to this place. He is torn by them, whether he stands still or moves in the direction that promises the least pain, he is gripped and pulled and twisted. He resists these gods of destruction despite the urge to give up and fall to his knees in a submission that would be sacrificing his life, his love and everything he holds dear.

He stepped out into the cold air and moved towards the dark clouds that were gathering only for him. There was nothing grandiose about this knowledge, only a humble certainty. If the clouds called to anyone else, they were welcome to join him in his splendid isolation.

The timing of the deluge was perfect. No pause pregnant with redundant meaning. No build up. He turned his face upwards and felt cold fat globules upon his face in that instant. As the arrows of water fell upon him, he opened his coat, bared his chest and roared his defiance. There was nothing left to do. He felt a calming strength in his vulnerability and as the rains cleansed his body, they first rid him of his worrisome doubt. As that filth soaked into the ground below him he saw the lessons that his pain had always been conveying. Chalk marks on the board of his mind that he could at last decipher.

Past, present and future dissolved, along with so many noisy devices of deceitful torture. There was precious little left in this moment. He gave himself over to the elements. They could do with him as they would. 

Now he saw that she had not left him. That was not the truth of it. That was not how it was. She had left herself well before she walked away from him. In the end, her actions were not personal. Only his ego could be hurt by someone who so obviously had a bad relationship with herself. There was pain within him that was her pain to endure. He had taken it upon himself. Duplicated it. Worn it in a twisted form of penitence. He had overstretched himself in a bid to understand, and in that endeavour he had bathed himself in the stinging mud of a pain that did not belong.

He laughed into the rain as that mud sloughed off of him. His laughter mocked the very nature of so much of the pain that he had dragged around with him for far too long. It was not his. It was never his. Gifts from childhood that had formed a ritualistic and habitual addiction. He was a collector of pain, when he was built to gather meaning.  

He questioned his missing her. Another habit. A bad addiction. His investment in her was no reason to cling on. He conflated that investment into something far bigger than her. Bigger even than him. It was everything. His life. His home. His world. Now, as the rain enclosed him and removed the sight of the jaded reality he’d created to trap himself into a state that burned him from the inside out, he understood that this had all been on him. That he was the sole engineer of his bad state.

Now he was smiling. A huge grin that let the rain find a way into his mouth. He tasted it. He drank it. Felt it filling him. Filling him with something different. Something temporary that would leave him with the necessary space to live again. To love again. His coat fell to the damp ground, but he barely registered it. This moment was all. He was changing and he would be the change. He would become what he desired and in that becoming he would be more him. 

This wasn’t deserved. This just was. He’d seen the opportunity and now he was embracing it. So many wasted opportunities. As many as the rain drops falling hither and thither around him. Missing their mark. But really, it was about the intended target opening themselves up to what was being presented. Overcoming their fears and lack of trust. Overcoming what they thought was themselves, when all it was, was a series of reactions driven by needlessly harboured pain.

He'd craved a loving relationship and for quite some while, he’d thought that was what he had had. He could deliberate forever and a day as to how real those golden days were. In the end, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was now. And yet he would treasure the memories they had made together. They were as real as could be. He intended to be worthy of those memories in being as real as he should always have been. 

That was the point here. That was the meaning. Hankering over what was lost would not bring it back. Teasing at the wounds to establish how they were caused would not heal them, instead it would prolong the agony. This was not about loss. It was about his being lost.

She had entered an unreachable place. A state thrumming with fear driven aggression. They called the barrier she deployed to feel a sense of anger filled safety trauma response. Another anomalous phrase that further distracted and confused. There was no response, only reaction. Instant, aggression that prevented any kind of relating. Weaponised anger with blades of blame that hurt him again and again. He could see her beyond that brutal reaction, but try as he might, he could never reach her. He held her hand. He hugged her. He whispered loving assurances and promised her that he was as safe as it got. Reminded her of all they had. Of who she was. What he was to her. Asked her what it was that she wanted. What was needed.

She never answered. Not once. He could see that she wanted to. She was there across the chasm of her fear, but as she considered reaching out to him, something changed in her eyes and she no longer saw him. Instead she saw the perpetrator of her pain.

He began to think in a series of cliches and sayings. Song lyrics. Lines from movies. One recurring line we hurt the ones we love. Her reactions to him were not mere coping mechanisms she had used to defend herself from her abuser. The way she had become was more extreme than anything she had enacted when she was in the lava flow of the originating pain inflicted upon her by another broken and fearful human being. This so called trauma response was a kind of dark wish fulfilment. Deep down, he knew this. His love endured and he told himself again and again that she didn’t mean it. And he was right in his assessment of her. The problem was that she didn’t mean anything anymore. She had disconnected herself from meaning, in a heart-breaking miscalculation. She’d made a bad choice based upon a series of bad choices made in her increasingly irrelevant past. Drifting from the real and towards oceans of pain and darkness from which she may never return.

Thinking of the why of her for the very last time, he lets it all fall away into the waters below him. She was lost to herself before she ever lost him. There is a tragedy in losing someone when they remain in the world. No longer alive. Existing. Hurting themselves in favour of indulging in the beautiful risk of life. Deaf and blind to his love. He gave and he gave and he has to believe that love given, the energy of his life devoted to another, all of what he did and was, counts. It mattered and so he still matters. 

He feels it now. He feels his connection with this life of his. The cruel caress of the rain awakens him to love. He has been unable to cry. Now the rain does his crying for him. Baptising him into a new phase of his life, a life he was always meant to live. And as the waters anoint him he feels pure joy rise from deep within.

Boys don’t cry.

This boy doesn’t cry. Why would he? He’s happy. He’s always been happy. He understands his worth and he is so pleased for the man that he has become. That he is becoming, and will continue to strive to be. Glad that he has returned to the fold. Remembered himself at long last. 

That little boy has remained steadfast and awaited this moment. He kept the faith. He knew this would happen. No need for tears. That is not what he is about. That is not how he is made. He is made with gratitude, and filled with love. This life is a wonder. A fleeting miracle that should never, ever be wasted.  

The little boy is the man’s true self. He is his soul. And at last the man is aware of what he is and better still, what he is meant to be.

Thank you!

He shouts his heartfelt gratitude into the rain and into the dark, grey clouds that came to him at the very moment they were required. He will never know whether he summoned them, or they summoned him. The truth is both of those things and far, far more. Everything is a part of a greater whole. Everything is meant to be. Life may be a series of choices, but really, those choices are a set of directions. Charting a course through life to the place we were always meant to be, going via a path well-travelled and yet elusive, mysterious and constantly challenging. Embracing the journey and loving each and every morsel of it while we can. Loving our life come what may. Embracing it all in the moment and forever being grateful for all that we have, all that we are and all that we intend to be. 

There stands a man in the midst of the rain. Not so very long ago, there was but a shadow of that man. A lost shade. Now he is whole again, and his purpose shines from him. He is a force to be reckoned with. The little boy smiles and the man’s face lights up just the way it did when he was young and knew better.