I tried to let the page come out of me. It wouldn't. But then,
I remember one night, many nights, when Mommy and I were fighting,
Then, by itself, my hand started writing.

I wake up in the morning and I hear mommy screaming.
I am driving to school and I still hear mommy screaming.
My friend sees me but I see mommy.
She walks towards me and asks me, “What is wrong, what is wrong?”
But I think its mommy and I push away.
I cry.

I am afraid of myself.
I am hurt but I hurt others,
I am unhappy but I make others unhappy,
I try to hide the screaming in my head but others hide from me instead.

I want to apologize, I want to say it ten times, I want to say it a million times,
Until the frowns I have hurt the world with,
Have vanished.

But the world hurts me, too.
It spits and spites when I take off my disguise, my smile. It does not understand that it is tiring.
Sometimes, it is truly wonderful to simply smile, and to hide who I am and what I feel,
But it is terribly unfortunate that they cannot accept my truth.

The truth, that I am human.
That I am a crier.
I cry when I see a homeless man begging every car for spare change.
I have to cry when I see African children starved and deprived.
I cry when mommy doesn’t let me see Daddy, When we fight, when we embrace.

I cry because I cannot hide all the things that trouble me,
Because others can keep their pain within this jar inside of them, but I cannot.
Because others take me as an emotional, senseless woman,
Because they expect me to always greet the world smiling,
When all I know and see and hear is chaos.

How do you hide from that?

I am a sufferer and a tormenter.
But I am human, are not we all?
And humans have feelings,
And so I am afraid,
That if one day I cannot cry,
I am not human.
And so I cry, hoping someone will finally hear me.
Hoping that they, too, might cry with me and share humanity together,
Because when I look around,
There are many who scorn my tears, who pity me.
No, I do not need pity.
They have probably never cried in so long,
Or maybe they have and they hide it,
Maybe they hide their tears because,
They are afraid of who they are. Humanity.
Crying is not weakness. It is strength.

And the next time I cried, it was not because I could not smile like the others, it was not because mommy regretted my birth, or because others thought of me as weak. Or even because
I watched a little girl at the airport cry
When soldiers brought in her father’s coffin.

I cried because I was happy that I could.