(As told by a girl with nothing on her desk except a notebook, pen, and a bowl full of cherry pits and stems.)
You sit next to a girl with purple hair in biology. You two get along quite well, and the conversations never feel forced. The only admittedly minor obstacle is that the class often requires you to be in a group of four for projects, and you two don’t know anyone else in the class. Your teacher doesn’t seem to mind that you two only talk to each other because you work well enough together. Today was a day for working in groups.
The assignment seemed simple enough until it made its way to your shared table. The girl with the purple hair started answering the easy questions on the front side while you stared at the clock. There wasn’t really much for you to do at the moment. You knew she was better than you at this sort of stuff. A few minutes passed, and the girl with the purple hair finally turned to you.
“I don’t understand this,” she said quietly. You tore your eyes away from the clock and looked at the question she was stuck on as if you could be of any help. If she didn’t know it, the chances that you did were very little.
“Um, maybe the pattern is supposed to mirror itself?” you suggested. She blinked at you with a blank expression on her glittery face.
“What?” she asked after a beat of silence, a tinge of hysteria in her voice.
“Like, A goes with T, and T goes with A. The pattern. I dunno, though.”
She stared back at you wordlessly.
“Here, I’ll write it,” you said, reaching for your pen. You wrote down the pattern you were thinking of and stared down at it. “Does that look right? I can’t tell.”
“I don’t know,” the girl with purple hair said, voice wavering. You kept your eyes on the paper and tilted your head to the side.
“Maybe it’s supposed to be filled in or something,” you said.
“Just leave it the way you wrote it,” the girl with purple hair responded. You looked up at her and–oh no, she’s crying.
You felt yourself freeze as a single tear escaped from her right eye.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
She looked you in the eyes as more tears fell from her own.
“Please don’t cry,” you whispered, voice cracking. I don’t know what to do when girls cry, you thought. From the guilty look on her face, you could tell that she knew you didn’t know what to do. She didn’t seem to know what to do either.
You watched as tears fell from her brown eyes and past her glitter-dusted eyelids.
Her tears slipped down her face, and you thought, maybe that’s what you look like when you cry during those sleepless summer nights. You couldn’t know for sure; no one ever saw you cry. Not the girl with purple hair, not you, not even god, because no one can bear to look at a girl reduced to tears. That was why girls cried in the privacy of their enclosures. Logically, girls had no reason to cry. They were at the peak of their youth. When you were a girl, you were considered beautiful and gifted, the closest thing to an angel people could think of. When people thought of girls, they did not think of them as crying girls, which was ironic, because that’s what they spent half of their girlhood doing. Mourning.
You cried a fair deal. You cried when you were sad, happy, frustrated, but mostly when you were angry. People didn’t know that, of course. To everyone who ever knew you, you were a sort of endearing optimist, although you did worry quite a bit. But their perceptions of you did not change the fact that you cried a fair deal.
It was a sort of unspoken pact among girls to never let people see them cry. There was no place in society for a teary-eyed girl. People didn’t like to see girls cry, and more importantly, did not know what to do with them when they did. This was why they cried in their own arms, away from anyone with the gift of sight. They needed to contain themselves until they had a moment alone because once girls were reduced to their most vulnerable state, all people saw was a girl with tears in her eyes and hysteria in her heart. And once they saw the hysteria and waterworks, whatever you had to say, show, or do was invalid. All they can see is an overly emotional girl who inconveniences people with her crying. All they can see is that raw and wild energy that all girls have buried within them. That raw and wild energy that they have to keep buried because there is no coherent way to express it to anyone, not even themselves.
But isn’t that the very definition of girlhood? To feebly attempt to express yourself through writing, painting, and creating, when all people hear and see is that defining word “attempt.” Girls are just mosaics of things they love, trying so hard to define that horrid longing inside of them with no one there to nod along encouragingly or to assure them that they’ve almost got it. There is no song that they can relate to, that they can belt loud enough to make people understand. There is nothing in the world that can accurately put girlhood into a way that everyone can understand.
You, for example, try to express yourself through lyrics and book passages, try to express your feelings and state of being to people who can only respond with, “I don’t understand.” You can beg on your hands and knees, and you can pray to all the gods in the universe, but it is in their nature to trip over themselves while trying to understand you. And it is in their nature to shrug, give up, and move on to the next puzzle.
And one of the saddest parts of all is that even girls can’t explain why they cry or what to do when they do. Not even they can soothe each other. Not even they can understand each other, not fully, anyway. They can hurt each other, love each other, and say that they’re all in it together, but girls cannot go through girlhood together. That is the point of girlhood.
And so, when you look back at the girl with purple hair, you know that she does not expect you to do anything. She wants to be seen and understood, but she cannot stand to be looked at in her current state. The only thing that either of you can do is wait for it to pass.
She snaps at you to look away, and you do. You don’t take offense because you know. You know. You stay quiet, looking down and wishing you knew how to go about handling a girl crying. The girl with the purple hair uses the sleeves of her jacket to wipe away her tears hurriedly, and you pretend not to notice. You almost wish you didn’t have to pretend.
And one of the saddest parts of all is that you will go home, and you will curl up in your desk chair and keep replaying that moment in your head–the moment when that first tear fell from the eye of the girl with purple hair. You will take out your notebook and begin to write. And inevitably, you will cry. You will feel grateful that no one else is home so that you can sob as loud as you want. You want to be loud, but you can’t. Girls are meant to be invisible when they cry, and to be invisible, you need to be quiet. So, you take shaky breaths and put pen to paper as your tears fall.
The only thing you can do is wait for it to pass.
This is why girls cry.
About the Author:
Mavis Sterling enjoys writing, reading, and crocheting. She’d like to be a real writer one day. She lives in Arizona with her books & manuscripts.
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