A point comes when you simply have to stop.
I walked from the driveway into my apartment, spoke briefly with my flatmates.
"You look pale," they remarked, adding "and wait, as if you're about to burst into tears. Are you okay?"
I shook my head and walked quickly into my bedroom, where I lay down and started to cry.
B had followed me, and she knelt down to look at me. "What's wrong?"
"I'm just...tired."
I didn't want to talk about it. I'd spent days wanting to talk about it, but it didn't make sense and it was the first time anyone had actually asked of their own volition. The time window had closed, and I simply wanted to channel the anger and disappointment, to convert it to fuel and use it for something.
I was tired of caring, of feeling alone, of hearing "Well, I thought you'd say something" when all I wanted was to be asked. I was tired of trying to trust people, to open up and eliminate the shyness. I was tired of driving. I was thoroughly sick of the seemingly inevitable disappointment that would settle over me, despite my attempts to brush it off with a casual, "Oh well, it happens and what can you do?" I was tired of being laidback and easygoing, I was tired of not doing what I wanted to do, of playing hostess and director and happy-go-lucky friend/daughter/acquaintance.
I was tired of smiling, and I was tired of waiting for someone to notice and ask about the fact that my eyes weren't shining they way they normally do when I grin and mean it.
I just wanted to cry and hate everyone for a few moments.
After I cried myself exhausted, I dozed before I rose, washed my face, got dressed and headed out for the afternoon's events.
Later in the evening, I began to read the copy of "Franny and Zooey" I'd been given as a gift earlier in the day.
She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment - then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a voilent outburst-inburst. When it stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body. Her face tear-streaked but quiet expressionless, almost vacuous, she picked up her handbag from the floor, opened it, and took out the small pea-green clothbound book. She put it on her lap - on her knees, rather - and looked down at it, gazed down at it, as if that were the best of all places for a small pea-green clothbound book to be. After a moment, she picked up th ebook, raised it chest-high, and pressed it to her - firmly, and quite briefly. Then she put it back intot he handbag, stood up, and came out of the enclosure. She washed her face with cold water, dried it with a towel from an overhead rack, applied fresh lipstick, combed her hair, and left the room. - J.D. Salinger
