For Crying

I see a bowl of Cheerios covered in a layer of sugar. The cereal has been sitting in the milk so long the Os have expanded and the sugar has turned to a wet, grey paste. The cereal is mine. I sit at the table in my t-shirt and underwear and I cry for reasons I cannot remember. But I cry all the time at this age. I hear explanations like, she’s just sensitive, or, she’s a weepy kid. My childhood is marked by red, swollen eyes and a raspy voice.

My voice is what I think about as I sit in the doctor’s office, see the scope and long tube hung on the wall. He’ll look at my larynx, put that scope into my nose and down my throat. I notice how long the tube is, imagine it slide into my nostril, past my sinuses, down into my esophagus—well, maybe not that far. This doctor is a specialist. No; a specialist-specialist. The first doctor—my primary—referred me to a specialist: ear, nose and throat. He referred me to this doctor, the specialist-specialist. He’s the one that makes me think about the cheerios.

There must have been an event in your past that damaged the vocal chords so badly you developed polyps.

Some event.

Singular.

Like I stood up at a hockey game during a hat-trick and screamed at the top of my voice for the rest of the game in a singular burst of celebration and exultation.

You must use your voice a lot, he says. By a lot he means, like a public lecturer, an audiobook voice-actor, an opera singer. I am none of these.

Have the polyps been there long? Are they cancerous? Are they from smoking? I smoked from age 12 to 33.

They could be from smoking, he agrees. They don’t look cancerous, but the only way to tell is to biopsy. But first, the scope.

He sprays my nose with a numbing mist he promises is worse than the scope. It’s not worse. The scope is a 30-foot snake biting my insides as its forced into my skull. The scope is one of the most unpleasant experiences imaginable in my over-active imagination. Thoughts of torture and vacuums invade my mind. I push away images of gasoline pumps, firehoses, penises. I settle on cheerios.

I see the brown bowl with speckled glaze. A spoon handle rises from its side. Crescents of milk fill the spaces between the Os. Sugar melts into tiny rivulets of clear syrup swirling into the white. Cereal arches form over infinitesimal worlds. The quietest places exist under those small curves. My larger world is louder.

Eat your pig troth, pig. You’re such a baby. Loud, fat baby. Piggy. Pig.

My siblings call me pig like it’s my name. They enjoy the reaction, I’m told. They say these things to goad me. They’d stop if I’d stop reacting. Mom says they do this because of me. I cry more. When I cry more, they tease me more. If I could stop, they would stop. But I cannot stop. I cry until my voice breaks.

Each time, I cry until my voice goes out like a camping lamp when we’ve forgotten the fuel canister and we all watch it fade, then flicker, then stare into darkness at our erasure. We wait like we cannot believe its miracle, that it gave us light at all, that it finally winked away.

When I cry myself to sleep, I wake up crying still. I give myself the hiccups, dry heaves, headaches. Sometimes the heaves are not dry and acid fills my mouth. Sometimes, I hide under the bed. My heart pounds in my chest when I hear them looking for me.

As I hide, I remember a story my grandmother told about my uncle hiding under the bed because he didn’t want his face washed after spaghetti dinner. I see him asleep there. Grandmother claims the National Guard came. The whole neighborhood looked for him. The police searched. I imagine helicopters and dogs on leashes pulling men through tall grass as they call out his name. As I hide beneath the bed, I know they won’t call my name. I know they look for me to continue teasing me. My feral siblings run down the hall. They slam doors and overturn hampers. They run into each other and have their own skirmishes, sharpening their tongues and tossing punches. But I am the one they really want.

Little pig. No; big pig! A cacophony of laughter.

Dad joins them in their taunting. I want to be tough for him. Mom says he has a good sense of humor. He knows how to take a joke.

You shouldn’t cry so much; did you ever think of that?

I did. But I cannot stop crying.

I cry my entire adolescence, my young adult life, my struggle with alcohol and self-medication matching my dad’s struggle with pills and meth. I cry until I cannot cry anymore, until I ask the doctor why my voice is so raspy, why it is slipping away.

The scope rests.

I see through the cheerios, to the doctor’s office, to me with my head tilted back watching the images of my pink throat glistening on the monitor. One polyp is glossy grey, like the sugar on the cheerios. The other is angry red and pointed. They face off on each side of my voice box, like bad neighbors, like traumatized siblings. In three weeks, each will be surgically removed. In a month, they’ll be found benign. In two months, I’ll be able to talk again; for the first time in my life I won’t have a raspy voice.

My voice is clear like a crystal goblet tapped with a fork.

I’ll start to sing. I’ll take music lessons. I’ll join a ukulele band. I’ll read to my children. I’ll become a lecturer. I’ll use my voice for a thousand positive things.

And I’ll still cry when I need to; I won’t judge myself for crying.

Rhonda Zimlich teaches writing at American University in Washington D.C. She writes about inter-generational trauma and the unbreakable spirit of youth. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Past-Ten, American Writer's Review, and others. She was awarded the 2020 Dogwood Award for Nonfiction and the Spring 2021 Please See Me Award for fiction. She holds an MFA in Writing from VCFA. Follow her on Twitter @rhondazimlich