Summer 1964 — Victoria Chang
There are 1,645 boxes. Inside each box is a small white dot. On some days, the dot looks like a dot. On other days, each dot is one of my tears. 1,645 tears in the last week. Mary Ruefle kept a cryalog. My log is here, in these squares. I now know that tears aren’t stillborn. In Chinese, 心疼 is different from 心裡難受. The first means heart hurts. The second means heart inside is uncomfortable. In English, we say my heart aches. In every language, the heart can be in pain. But the heart doesn’t feel pain. It is not a small mammal. Tears do not come from the heart. They do not come from the eyes, or the body. They come from outside of us, like time, from one large repository, which is why we cry when other people cry. In this way, tears are communal. We depend on each other for our sadness.
