cry cry cry

Sure, she cries easily, but not about real life, her life. Never about things that can be helped, the spilt milk at work or her own puddling relationships. It's the imaginary, the assumed and supposed, that sets Ruby off. And who can blame her? What unwieldy parcels humanity seems to carry! Deep love, bitter loss, no money for bread and cells that multiply when they shouldn't. Ruby watches sparrows flap their wings in clouds of dust and her lip quivers. She sees children with bruised knees and fathers walking in their brown ragged coats and the tears well up in her wide eyes. Like left for right, she mistakes beauty for tragedy, pain for beauty, life for pain, tragedy for passing time. Under the unbearably blue spring sky these great themes package themselves into moments for Ruby to stumble and cry over. Just a tear or two for these strangers and neighbors, though. She sleeps well enough at night and her friends? Well, they make her laugh. They are young. And it's spring, after all.

July, though. With July comes a crime spree -- all manslaughter and fraud and rumbles on every corner. The rain falls in thick curtains every afternoon and when clouds part, it is only to make way for grey rainbows and murderous crows. Ruby is waterlogged. She can not see the rain for all the tears. One night as she walks from the park, Ruby sees a girl fighting with a man on the front steps of a house. The girl has hair like Ruby, dark and short, and when the man yells at the girl I can't even stand to look at you Ruby almost believes he is yelling at her through the black air. He slams the door and the girl picks up a flowerpot and hurls it at his absence. The terracotta hits the wall; the girl's face shatters into a million pieces; Ruby feels her own face beginning to crack. So, it's true. I really am made of glass, she thinks even as the girl, the other girl, looks over at Ruby and says Why the hell are you crying?

Why the hell are you crying? This is a question Ruby can not answer. Not when the spokes of her bicycle ask, not when the hinge on the gate wants to know, not when the robins inquire, or when she poses it to herself in the middle of the night. It was not her flowerpot, her heart, her life, her man shutting the solid door in her face. It is never her skinned knee, her bruised heart, her romatic sunset that she cries over. So why then? Why? Ruby hates waste and she can not stand carelessness. So why shed tears that only spillover into a river, already overflowing with sadness, that goes nowhere? Ruby resolves to toughen up.

And she does. She stops looking through the windows of other peoples lives and starts looking over her own shoulder. When a bird flies over head, Ruby no longer thinks of the beauty of its frail, hollow bones. Instead she curses the mess it makes on the windshield of her car. She puts on headphones to block the noise and walks miles with her head down instead of riding the bus. Why cry, she thinks. Don't you dare cry. And since she doesn't have an answer, she doesn't.

It is many months later and the moon is very full on the night that Ruby meets John for the first time. Fall has arrived with usual languorous reds and oranges and Ruby resists being enamored by the changing leaves. They sit, John and Ruby, at a table under the skeletal arms of trees and drink read wine in their scarves. John is smart but his attention annoys Ruby, his attentiveness to details and the way he points out two squirrels chasing each other, weaving their around the trunk of a tree. She starts to fidget first and then chafe against the tenderness, the sentimentality he seems to seep for everything with cells and atoms. Get a grip Ruby shout in her head Live in the real world, buddy. She tries to smile though, and thinks that she is convincing until John stops his story about a boy with a kite in the middle of sentence. He looks at Ruby and then touches her hand, which is twirling her glass of wine around and around by stem. Hey he says and Ruby stops to look up at him for first time. Hey. Ruby. Don't write me off just yet. And that is all it takes. With that, Ruby starts to cry and cry and cry because she realizes that she is still transparent. The only thing that has changed is that she has become a more brittle kind of glass.