I Cried In A Bathroom Between Classes

You know which one it is now.

The second floor, the far end, the one with the door that sticks. It is the least used one in the building and you found it in about week three and you have been going there ever since.

Ten minutes. Sometimes seven. And then you wash your face and you put your bag back on your shoulder and you go out into the corridor and you are entirely convincing within about four seconds.

Two or three times a week since October.

And what is wearing you out is not the crying. That is genuinely worth saying: the ten minutes is not the exhausting part. The exhausting part is the four seconds, and the corridor afterward, and the specific work of holding a face together for six more hours.

Here is what I want to say before anything else, and it is not what most people would say.

There is nothing wrong with the ten minutes. Nothing. The bathroom is not the problem and I am not going to treat it as one.

The problem is that there are two of you, and only one of them has ever been seen by anybody.

I water my couch with my tears

There is a line in Psalm 6 that is almost embarrassing in its physical detail.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. (Psalm 6:6, King James Version)

That is not a dignified sentence.

Make I my bed to swim. Water my couch. It is exaggerated, it is physical, it is the sort of thing a person says when they have gone past caring how it sounds, and somebody wrote it down and put it in a book that other people would read.

Nobody edited it. Nobody made it more restrained on the way in.

You are permitted an undignified sentence, and something said past the point of caring how it sounds has never once been too much for the book it went into. Psalm 6:6 keeps the exaggeration and the physical detail exactly as they came, and the Holy Spirit is the one behind a door that sticks, on the second floor, at the far end.

And notice the first clause, which is the one that describes your actual situation.

I am weary with my groaning.

Weary with it. Not weary from the trouble. Weary from the doing of the grieving itself, which is a completely different exhaustion and which is exactly what you have been carrying since October.

You are weary with the carrying and not weak in the face of it, and being tired from managing something has never once been the same as being unable to manage it. The written word names the weariness as coming from the groaning itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows which of the two things is actually tiring somebody.

Two people, one of them unseen

Now the practical part, and it is about the four seconds rather than the ten minutes.

A private version and a public version cost more than either would alone.

That is the arithmetic nobody explains. Grief costs something. A performance costs something. But maintaining a boundary between them, every day, several times a day, watching the door, timing the ten minutes, checking the face, is a third cost, and it is larger than either of the other two.

And it is entirely made of the secret rather than of the sadness.

You are paying a third cost that is made of secrecy rather than sorrow, and keeping two versions apart has never once been cheaper than letting one person see both. The Holy Spirit is the one who ends a boundary that has been maintained since October, and Psalm 6:6 puts the undignified private thing straight into a public book.

And here is what makes the secret keep itself, which is why two months have not softened it. Every day the corridor version works, it becomes more true that nobody would believe the other one.

That is the loop. The corridor version is convincing, so nobody suspects, so telling somebody now would require overturning two months of evidence that one person manufactured personally, and the longer it runs the larger the overturning gets.

It does not get easier by waiting. It gets fractionally harder every week.

Crying between classes is not a verdict on a person.

You are able to stop the overturning from getting any larger, and two months of being convincing have never once made the truth impossible to say. Psalm 6:6 puts the whole of it in the record without any concern for how it looked, and the Spirit of God is the one who interrupts a thing that has been building since October.

Say it, and do not laugh

So here is the thing to do, and the second half is where it lives or dies.

Tell one person here, out loud, that the crying between classes has been happening. And do not laugh while you say it.

The laugh is the thing to guard against. It will come. It is almost automatic, and it will arrive at the exact moment the sentence lands, and it is not amusement. It is an instruction to the other person telling them how seriously to take what was just said.

You are able to say it without instructing anybody how to receive it, and a laugh attached to a true sentence has never once been anything except a way of taking it back. It is written in Psalm 6:6 that a man wrote down the most undignified version of himself without softening it, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a corridor where somebody says it flat.

Say it flat, then. I have been crying in the toilets between classes. Two or three times a week since October.

And then stop, and do not qualify it, and let there be whatever silence there is.

What usually happens is not what people expect. The other person does not become awkward. The other person, very often, says something about their own version, because a great many people in that building have a door that sticks somewhere and have told nobody either.

You are able to find out that a building is full of people with their own version, and one flat sentence has never once been received as badly as the imagined version of it. Scripture keeps the exaggerated private sentence in the public record, and the same Spirit who let it stand is beside you in the corridor.

And if the ten minutes has begun to carry thoughts about not being here at all, that is not for a corridor conversation. Tell somebody today, out loud, in person, and if it is urgent go to an emergency room or ring an emergency number where you are. That is not a dramatic act, and nothing about it means anybody has failed.