Some days I am secretly thankful of that moment in Paris when Seb, of all people, managed to drive home that it was okay to be a girl.
Today, for example, my mascara is running, my nose has been emitting those ever-so-feminine wet sucking noises at uneven intervals, and I'm generally wandering around, all tough-and-rumble, in my black jeans and uneven black sweater and black-on-black leather shitkicker heels, sniffling like a baby.
Gary patted me on the back and asked me if I was alright, Stuart tried to convince him that I was allergic to his sneakers.
Really, I'm still crying about the opera last night.
And deepest inside I stand fully behind what I told Allie when she turned to me and her face scrunched up in surprise to find my makeup running down my chin as soon as the lights went up after Act II.
I am proud that I am capable of losing myself to the story. I am proud that my imagination is still powerful enough, despite years of abuse, to run away with each falling melody.
And most of all, I am desperately proud that I can let myself cry, allow myself to feel so deeply over something so insignificant as an armful of people in period costumes crawling about on a stage.
There are, of course, complications to this simplistic-sounding concept.
Being a monster of extremes, when I let go and fall into a story, I fall completely, give myself up absolutely, tear down my walls and open my heart to the agony of the storyteller, so that his pain is shared and lessened somehow.
In my brain, at least. In my narcissistic-want-to-believe-I'm-significant brain, I believe that I'm making a difference with this simple gesture of wholehearted (literally) apreciation.
But all that's rhetoric. The filler behind the tears still running down my face, despite Friday lunch with the crew, despite lava lamp discussions and finding my right words in some of the right places, despite great booming laughs that have echoed about the office some of which entirely of my own fault...
I am still crying because Jenufa, a beautiful Czech opera about love and pain and misery and the stupid things we've done...
...Jenufa, somehow, was very nearly about abortion.
See, the thing about opera and my instant welling of wet and salty projectiles is the bit where someone always dies, someone loved and dear and wonderful, someone gloriously heroic and strong who made this planet a better place, and rather than cry back at my grandfather's funeral or twelve years ago where the survival rate of most of my "friends" was three months after the first injection, when I was still incapable of such a letting go, of feeling, now I cry for every person who has taught me about love, and there is a great tearing inside my heart, reminding me how many people I still love, how fortunate I am that I would feel so much pain if a single one of them disappeared from this particular reality.
Weird, I know. Selfish, I know -- but I'm still getting a handle on this being nice to people thing.
Now the abortion bit. In yesterday's opera, the unfortunate victim was Jenufa's eight day old son, who was thrown into an icy river by her stepmother.
Her stepmother, being the strongest soprano in the play, was instantly the character I favoured and paid most attention to and therefore began to identify with.
And when she had the choice to make, watch her daughter's life ruined at such a young age or give her another chance by throwing this mewling, helpless infant into the river...
And the lighting was so perfect, and the set so stark, and her voice so perfectly lilting...
When she returned amidst much Macbethian rubbing of hands, I cried.
And cried.
And cried, remembering the first time I cried that way, seventeen years old and in one of twelve starkest hospital beds filled with girls who'd messed up.
All of us crying, all of us afraid to look at each other, the nurses staring straight ahead, faceless and cold and judgmental.
And I remember the Christmas after, one of the only christmases I've ever celebrated, remember sitting on a soft blue couch, thinking
"he, she, it..."
would have been born right around then.
And I did that, for years, every December.
This year it'll be nine years.
This spring it will be nine years since something growing inside of me died, and the story is irrelevent, the medication I was on irrelevent, it had stopped dividing before I even had a chance to make the choice, and even that is irrelevent.
In those nine years I have healed so many of my scars, forgiven so many faces, forgotten so many others. I have learned to love and laugh and cry with my entire being, I have attained closure all the while picking up new neuroses along the way.
And I have done it at the speed of light, with the resiliance of rhinoceros skin.
In the last nine years I have lived a thousand lifetimes and gotten over enough to build nine brand new characters.
And last night, crawling into a sleepy Dave's arms, I cried and cried and cried
for the beauty of that aria
and for an abortion that I had forgiven myself for, that I have talked about since as though it was just another scar that I' ve survived
except for last night when it was real and alive again, and I remembered the love of it too.