Condition.

"Good is better than perfect

Scrub till your fingers are bleeding

And I'm crying for things I tell others to do without crying."

~"Man of a Thousand Faces"

 

Photo courtesy of Google ImageSearch, which found this on a blog by Daniel Hope (click for original).

I started crying in the physics homework lab today. I felt bad for the TA helping me. We were talking about magnetic fields and right hand rules and my eyes just slowly started to well up with tears. I could tell he noticed because he started talking faster and stopped making eye contact, but I couldn't help myself and soon a steady stream of vulnerability was pouring down my face. He didn't know what to do (and what could he have done?), so he just kept talking, and I didn't have the heart (or the capacity) to tell him I'd lost him and his little spatial explanations five minutes beforehand. I told him I understood and thanked him for his help, even though I hadn't listened and he knew it. He told me the answer to my problem and I typed it in and left. As I stood outside the door, dripping emotions into my hands, a girl saw me, put her hand on my shoulder, and asked if I was all right. "Is there anything I can do?" she inquired, surprisingly sincere. "No, thanks; I'm fine," I replied, and tried to smile. She didn't buy it, and neither did I. I broke down again in the space between the two sets of north doors, with deep, fragile sobs that came from a place I can't find without cause.

I have cried more in the past two months than I have in the past two years.
Something is wrong with me, and it bothers me because for some reason my mind thinks I am strong. Maybe that's the only reason I don't fall apart on a daily basis, why the atoms and ions that make me me still hang around each other. My patchwork quilt is knit together with sheer, stupid self-concept.

Then I went to lunch at the Museum of Art and grabbed a red velvet cupcake with my normal half-sandwich and soup because, oh well, the lunatic wants a cupcake, and who am I to deny the freak? She might just start crying again.