I Never Cried

Chapter Zero (Prologue):

Age Five: "Daddy I hear someone is crying and the bathtub is leaking on my face too!"

Age Nine: "Daaaad the crying thingy is happening again."

Age Twelve: "Dad I promise I'm not crazy but these tears DO NOT belong to me!"

Age Fifteen: For the third time this week foreign tears rolled down my face. This time more harsh than they've ever been before, my eyes felt like they were on fire and my cheeks were dripping with salty liquid.

It started when I was five years old. Once or twice a month I would start crying and from the very beginning I knew that they weren't mine because I was never really upset or hurt when it happened. The first time it happened I was playing with some My Little Pony toys in the living room of our old house which, if you consider the layout, was beneath the bathroom explaining why I assumed the bathtub was broken.

By the time I was nine it happened maybe three times a month. It almost never interfered with things but that was probably because I didn't have many friends. I was the dorky nine year old who would sit and watch everyone else play games like cops and robbers while I read my book of the day. I was struggling to make friends because I was just beginning to feel like my mom's absence from my life was making a difference.

It was at least once a week that the tears of this stranger would stain my clothes and redden my eyes once I was twelve. My best friend Victoria was the only person besides my father who knew about these unwanted episodes and their frequency. We scoured the internet looking for "cures" to my tears and still found nothing, not even one other person had ever experienced anything like this.

Nowadays I sit in bed in the evenings waiting for the tears to come because I know they will. Around eight o'clock on Tuesday night I am watching craft tutorials on YouTube. The tears start and I stop looking at the screen in order to keep my laptop dry. The tears start for maybe twenty seconds and then I blink. I'm not in my room anymore and I'm not crying either .It's another voice sobbing, lying on a bed is a brown haired girl, probably about ten years old. Her room is painted a soft lavender and has drawings of her family and friends decorating the walls. Downstairs a woman is yelling and a boy who sounds old enough to be in second or third grade defending himself.

"It was an accident, It wasn't my fault!" the little voice loudly whines.

And suddenly I'm back in my room. According to the clock in the bottom corner of my computer screen three minutes have passed. I'm surprisingly not crying anymore. Although my cheeks are hot to the touch and I can feel the remains of tear streaks evaporating off my cheeks like rain on concrete in the summer.

My mind is racing, "Who was that girl and why was the woman's voice familiar, like I've heard it before." I whispered aloud to myself.

I closed my laptop instantly darkening my bedroom. I turned on the light and changed into an old t shirt from one of my dad's business trips and some pink plaid pajama pants then grabbed my iPod and ear buds from my desk and crawled into my bed. I sank into the mattress while letting my favorite blanket cuddle me to a state of near sleep.

All I could think of was the little girl and her shaking body in a heap on top of a set of rainbow colored bed sheets. What could such a little boy have done that earned him so much of an argument with his mother and why was her voice so dang familiar?

Due to my state of sleeplessness I decided that I needed a bath to think things through. I rinsed out the bathtub and began to fill it with hot water and my raspberry cream scented bubble bath. I got my inflatable bath pillow and sat down in the tub. At nearly 1 am I woke up startled to find that I was still in the bath tub but the water had been drained and I was draped in two of our thickest towels.

Knowing the gesture had come from my dad I giggled knowing that he had definitely walked into the bathroom with his eyes closed knocking things over in the process and sure enough two bottles of conditioner, a tube of moisturizer and an old toothbrush are lying on the rug.