Why Couldn't I Cry?

I’ve been sick for the past 9 days. It stinking sucks.

Thankfully, I’m not horribly ill; I’m just coughing a lot, and I’m definitely very contagious. One of the most devastating results of this is that I have been consistently been unable to participate in my favorite class and activity this quarter: social dance. Honestly, it’s probably my favorite class I’ve ever taken at Stanford—it has turned so many abominable mornings into phenomenal days, and I genuinely look forward to the class every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday night. This is my second social dance class, and it focuses mostly on my favorite dances of all time: waltz and Bohemian National Polka (BNP). I love the romantic regality of the dances, especially how BNP manages to weave in outrageous pomp and whimsy.

Since I’m sick, I can’t actually dance with my peers, but I am able to watch the class from the balcony. It turns out that this is way worse, because now I have to watch everyone joyously revel in the sublimity of social dance, all while I anxiously suck on cough drops and desperately suppress the coughs that inch their way up my throat. Still, I attend class, in part because I don’t want to miss any of the dances, but also because watching really good social dance scratches some deep itch in my soul.

One of my favorite parts of social dance is actually after class: as soon as class ends, some members of Dancebreak put on music, and people can optionally stay behind to dance even more. Before I got sick, I would stay behind and try out the new variations we had learned in class, and it’s always a treat to be able to dance with the really good follows and test my upper limits. Now, I just watch.

Today, after class, they played Bohemian National Polka, followed by some of the most hauntingly beautiful waltz songs. So many good dancers stayed after class, and their improvisation flowed like divine choreography. I found myself horribly moved, felt the tide of emotions well up in my chest, building, growing.

And then fade into nothingness.

In many other more private moments in the past few days, I’ve felt a similar welling up of emotions, and I’ve itched for them to be properly expressed. But for some reason, they always just fizzle out. The last time I can remember the crescendo of emotions actually climaxing was when I said goodbye to my fellow intern friends last summer. The hollowness in my chest had such a profound fullness, every tear running down my cheeks was so heart-wrenchingly painful, and in the depths of my grief, I felt at the zenith of my emotions. All I wanted in that moment, watching my fellow dancers twirl and waltz and polka and stomp, was to cry, to cry out my soul, to be ripped to shreds by the beauty of it all, to be pulled by the crescendo and puppeteered by the climax and laid to rest by the denonuement. I just wanted to feel alive.

But no. The emotions disappeared into nothingness. I begged my eyes to water, my tremors to triumph, my tears to run, but instead, they retreated deep into the well, and I just sat. Pulled and puppeteered and laid not, wholly stoic in spite of all my thrashing.

Why can’t I feel?

I do feel, but why only in black and white? There are ceruleans and mauves and lavenders that I have glimpsed, but only glimpsed, and so quickly do these bursts of color flit away from my perception. Never have I been able to will myself to see the rosied pinks of kind-hearted love or the obsidian blues of deep grief. In fact, the only color I can reliably will is the white-hot crimsons of self-directed anger. The anger that I’m not trying hard enough. The anger that I’m not doing better. The anger that I couldn’t cry.

As its own piece, I’m not very happy with this post. It paints me grandiose in writing yet robotic in experience. I do feel emotions, and I’d like to think that I’m quite empathic. This piece was written in a moment of anger(read: white-hot) and frustration at my apathy in the moment. I hope that, as I reveal more facets of my personality through the pieces I write, I will be able to convey a fuller picture.