I Cried In The Restroom

You were in there about four minutes and nobody has ever known.

You washed your face. You did the thing with the paper towel and the cold water. You looked in the mirror and got your face back to something that would pass, and you came out and somebody asked where the wipes were.

And that was it. That was the whole event. And you have thought about it more than you have thought about anything else that happened that day.

Because it was not even the worst day. That is the part that confuses you. It was an ordinary day out with the ordinary amount of things going wrong, and somewhere around two in the afternoon you found yourself in a stall with your hand over your mouth, and you did not entirely know why.

And you have told nobody. Not because it is a secret. Because there is no sentence for it that does not sound like more than it was.

I want to give you the sentence. And before that, I want to show you a verse about crying that is more specific than you would expect, and that has a bottle in it.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a line in the fifty sixth Psalm about tears being collected, and the physicality of it is the whole point.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

You have a verse in the written word where crying is collected rather than assessed, and no four minutes of yours has ever once gone unaccounted for. Psalm 56:8 asks for the tears to be put into a bottle rather than for the crying to stop, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to an afternoon in a public building.

Look at the request. Not: take this away. Not: help me stop. Put my tears into thy bottle.

That is a strange and beautiful ask. It treats tears as something worth keeping. Not as evidence of weakness, not as a problem to be solved, but as material to be gathered up and stored.

You are not looking at something that needed to be got rid of, and no part of that afternoon has once been a mess for you to clear up. It is written that the tears are asked to be put into a bottle, which is a request for keeping rather than for removal, and the Spirit of God is what tells a woman that her crying was collected rather than overlooked.

And then the second half, which is the part that does the work. Are they not in thy book.

There is a record. The Psalmist is not asking God to start paying attention. He is appealing to an account that already exists, and expecting the answer yes.

You have an account of that afternoon in a place you have never seen, and nobody else knowing has once made no difference to whether it was counted. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person that a private four minutes was not private in the way she assumed, and Psalm 56 has both the bottle and the book in one verse.

And notice the first clause too: thou tellest my wanderings. God counts the walking about. The going here and there, the small aimless movement of a difficult day. That is in the record as well.

The pretending is the heavy part

Now the practical part, and it is not about the crying.

The four minutes were fine. Genuinely. A woman crying briefly in a bathroom in the middle of a long day with children in it is one of the most ordinary events in the world, and if every woman it has happened to stood up at once there would be no room left to move in.

You are not the only woman who has done exactly this, and no afternoon of yours has ever once put you in a category by yourself. Psalm 56:8 has the tears asked for by name rather than apologized for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a woman in company instead of leaving her alone with four minutes.

What is heavy is the coming back out. The face. The voice you used to answer the question about the wipes.

Because in those two seconds you established something: that this did not happen. And once established, it has to be maintained, and it has been maintained ever since.

You are able to stop maintaining a thing that never needed to be hidden, and the four minutes have never once been what was tiring you. The Spirit of God is what shows a person the difference between an event and its concealment, and it is written that the tears are kept in a bottle rather than kept quiet.

And here is why the maintaining costs so much more than the crying. A hidden thing has to be checked. Every time somebody mentions that day, some part of you monitors whether anything is showing. That is a small tax, paid indefinitely, on four minutes that were nobody's fault.

You are able to put the monitoring down, and telling somebody has never once been the same thing as making a scene about it. It is written that the wanderings are told and the tears are bottled and the book already has them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman off duty from her own face.

There is one more thing, and it is about your children. They almost certainly knew something happened. Children read faces at a level adults have forgotten. What they did not know is what it was, and a child who knows something happened and does not know what it was will supply an explanation, and the explanation will usually be that it was them.

You are able to be a woman who has feelings in front of her own children, and having them has never once put a weight on any of those children. The Spirit of God is with a mother whose face is allowed to be true, and Psalm 56:8 puts the tears in a bottle rather than behind a door.

Tell one adult, and do not explain

So here is the assignment, and there are two halves, and the second half is the whole thing.

Tell one adult that you cried that day. And do not explain why.

One person. Whoever is safe. And the sentence is short: on Saturday, at the place with the water, I went into the restroom and cried for a few minutes.

You are able to say one plain sentence about your own afternoon, and saying it has never once required a reason to be attached. Psalm 56:8 asks for the tears to be kept without giving God a list of causes, and the Spirit of God is with a woman saying a true short thing at her own kitchen table.

And now the second half, which is where this article earns its keep. Do not explain why.

Not because explanations are wrong, but because you do not have one, and the search for one is what has kept you from saying it for three weeks. You have been waiting until you could account for it, and the account is not coming, because a person can cry in a restroom for entirely diffuse reasons and that is a complete and sufficient description.

You are able to report something without accounting for it, and having no reason has never once made the four minutes less real. It is written that the tears go into the bottle and the wanderings are told, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives an unexplained thing without asking a woman to justify it.

If they ask why, and they might, you can say: I do not really know. That is an answer. It is, in fact, the true one.