"My, as I call it, 'crying in awe' goes a little bit further than the conventional lacrimation with the divinity of the (oh, so appropriately named!) Requiem's installment - Lacrimosa. It’s hard not to cry together with 35-year-old Mozart over the heart-breaking truth of him being within hours from the grave and all his life's struggles as well as our own sins and fears of the unknown punishments yet to come. Everyone with a soul, no matter how shrunken, weeps listening to that.
I, on the other hand, is known to commence the waterworks even when watching a 'comedic' act - if it's brilliance manages to impact my aesthetic receptors. Like the first time I watched Bo Burnham's 'Make Happy' on Netflix: twenty minutes in, the tears just started pouring out of my eyes in recognition of the boy's astonishing talent. Stuff like that - in the movies, at plays, in the museums, over books...
And don't even get me started on J.Ivy's poetic contribution into Kanye West's 'Never Let Me Down' - it's profound beauty invariably triggers my tear ducts, every time I listen to the song...
Unfortunately, that's not the bulk of my tears production. Genius is rare, desperation abound...
♦♦♦
...Even though they were the biggest contributors into all that wetness, it wouldn’t be fair to place the entire blame for it on my most prevalent pain bringers – my parents first and my employers later. Even in my personal safe heavens of academic institutions – the places where my abilities and efforts have always been singled out, appreciated, rewarded, and even lauded – once in a while, there would be somebody to trigger the tear ducts. This primarily goes back to my Soviet youth – the time when I was powerless to do anything about, for instance, a Philosophy Department Chair openly expressing his surprise about what he perceived as an incongruity between my wild Jewish hair and my deep knowledge of classical marxism. (Dude! I had straight A's in everything - that's just how I was.) And that's the truth of it - sometimes random strangers can be as harmful as people who already know your soft spots. It’s funny how this type of small stuff sometimes ends up to be so devastating. It's so difficult to shake off such pointless rudeness. Its emotional violence feels as if a metal-studded cat-o’-nine-tails landed between your shoulder blades. And then, your breath catches, and you lose control of your ducts...
And what else can you possibly do but go and let it all pour out? In secret, of course... What other quick and ready means you have for mitigating the impulses to throw punches and yell, for disarming the triggers that have a potential of sending you into scandalous fits. Effectively, it helps you to dissociate: Regardless of what was happening inside my mind and at the center of my soul, I still went to work every day and performed all my duties, attended meetings and functions; kept the bosses’ businesses and my own household running smoothly, without a single visible glitch. Never a fucking mess in public. With all the pain hidden so deeply that other people, affected by the same terribly hostile environments, would frequently marvel, "How the hell do you manage to stay so composed? How do you bear this? How do you keep yourself so calm?” And I would just smile in response, while letting the nuclear devastation scorching away my sanity... Years of control-building and the aforementioned secret crying - that's how...
Yet, the bile's buildup had to manifest itself on the surface in some ways..."
Deleted from Chapter 4 - Bucket of Tears... and Blood