Dry

I got it pounded into my head early on that crying was somehow bad.  "Stop crying right now, or I'll give you something to cry about!" got said a lot in my home.  So I trained myself to not cry.  I trained myself to howl on the inside...but show no sign of it outwardly.

While it helped me survive, that was a hard choice to make.

You see, there came a time when all the emotions I'd bottled up for ages came boiling out...and I did not have the tears to shed to heal them.  The time was right, the place was safe, but I could not truly weep.  I dry-cried, horrible wracking sobs that nearly tore me apart, sobs that passed without giving me the relief of real tears.

More than a decade has passed since that day.  Within the past two years, I found myself crying, really crying, for the first time since I was nine years old. 

I still don't like to cry.  But I'm grateful that I can.