She weeps when there is no one around. In the daytime, the tears fall like rain. No one can see those. Everyone has gone to work. Only the animals see. They gather at her feet and seem to ask her why. Why do you cry? Why are you sad? What can we do?
The dog licks her toes. The cat climbs on her lap and makes biscuits on her shirt. All the while, she weeps. Does she even know why the tears come? Hot and salty burning her face. Her eyes become raw and achy from the sting of her tears. Sometimes she cries pretty, other times it is an ugly scene. Her nose runs, and voice cracks and she moans with pain of a thousand years of dreams broken. Does she even know why?
Sometimes she think she knows, but doesn't dare speak it lest she sound too pitiful. Other times, it just seems like the thing to do on those lonely days. Her days are spent alone. Anchored to a desk with a headset connecting her to a world and people she couldn't care less about. She talks for a living. Trying to be cordial and helpful to those who ring through. But in between, she weeps.
When did her life become so lonely? When did she become so old and jaded? What happened to the smiling girl in the picture when life held such promise? Where did she go? When exactly was the day her mind betrayed her and get so cloudy and muddled? The promises of life were broken. The success she promised herself is a long ago thought now.
She had wanted to be an educated woman, a doctor. She just knew she would go to college and be a great thinker and doer of things. She would find the love of a good man and have 4 children. She would live in a nice house and be a good wife and mother. Then came the day when that slipped through her fingers and fell to floor crashing into a million tiny pieces that were so unrecognizable no one would be able to put that shattered dream back together.
She wept all the time then. She didn't remember her dreams. She lived in a nightmare fully awake. Her thought processes became those of despair and death. She believed her mind when it said those things. She was stupid. She was ugly, she was a monster so horrible that no one could possibly like her let alone love her. Who did she think she was anyway? This blob of a girl, this horrid, putrid excuse for a human being? God did not create her. She was a creature from the deepest, coldest crevices of hell. She believed that she was a child of the devil himself. That is how her mind betrayed her. She had always believed her mind before. It had never lied to her, why should it lie now. She would be better off dead. It would have been better if she had never existed. She believed it. So, she wept.
Now, she knows better. She knows that she is of God, and was created in His image and light. But it is too late for her. She grieves a life that is lost. The life she should have had. All of the time it took for her to find her way back to the light made her too old, too broken and forgotten. She doesn't smile much anymore. She hardly ever sings anymore. She doesn't dream anymore. She merely exists in this world and will continue to do so until her time comes. She now hopes that that time comes soon. She is tired.
So very tired. Her body aches, and her head hurts. Sometimes, the tears do not fall. But there is a pain in her chest. She knows that it is her heart that weeps. One day to the next she goes about her business. There was a phrase in a movie she's seen many times; Get busy livin or get busy dyin. She no longer knows what to do. She feels it is too late to live, but it is not her time to die. So, she just is.
That is why she weeps.
