I do believe that vulnerability precipitates connection, but it also precipitates loss.

‘I’m really worried about you’, Hannah said, when I cried again, a month later, and then she broke my heart.

In the late nineteenth century, in England, crying was once again taboo. It was too irrational, too French, holding the threat of revolution. In Scotland, a century earlier, Henry Mackenzie had published The Man of Feeling, in which a man cried constantly. It was, to Robert Burns, ‘a book prized next to the Bible’. In late Victorian England, though, new editions were mocked, accompanied by satirical indexes. In the 1860s, as Queen Victoria mourned her mother and her husband, Republican sentiment grew; crying was both a monarch’s flaw and something that might bring down the nation. Queen Victoria emerged from mourning and changed her image, became Empress of India, and sensitivity was suspect.

It has remained this way, I think.

Liz Herbert McAvoy wrote, in 2015, that, to the neoliberal worldview, a subject on the verge of tears is ‘on the boundaries of failure’ and the tears themselves affirm this failure, undermine any performance of being fine.

I am a failed saint, a failed mystic, a failed neoliberal subject.

I felt, for a long time afterwards, each time I cried, that Hannah was right to break up with me, struggled to remind myself that crying was human, sometimes justified. I felt, each time I cried, that it was evidence that I was impossible to love.

‘A refusal to think.¹ Purposeless.’² Tears are manipulative; ‘every woman is wrong until she cries.’ ‘The world’s greatest water power is women’s tears.’³ The only non-human animals that cry are crocodiles, and their tears drip only when they open their jaws to devour their victims, squeezing their lacrimal ducts. ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk. Crying is the refuge of plain women.⁴ The waterworks.⁵ Childish whining. Emotional incontinence.’⁶ Maudlin, etymology drawn from Mary Magdalene’s weeping over Christ, can mean both sad and drunk, drawing the ecstatic and the abject close. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself’, Lewis Carroll’s Alice says, as tears pool around her, ‘to go on crying like this’. His Walrus cries for the lives of the same oysters that he consumes; what can those tears be but insincere?

I am writing against all of this, against the suspicion. It is too easy to turn against myself, to dismiss my own tears. I want to find a way to make crying beautiful so that I might redeem my failure, might save myself from a loneliness caused by tears. I have often loved people who could not bear it when I wept, who turned angry or simply left. I carry their responses in my mind. I am another of the lovers who cannot stand it when I cry.

I write as a form of prayer, asking to be forgiven, but I do not confuse desire with belief.

It is impossible to fill even a small pool with tears; the rate of evaporation is too fast. Tears are spectral, as impossible to hold as whoever I might be mourning. It is astonishing that I can produce so many tears and yet have produced nothing. I am an absurd fountain, a monument of shame. I am pooling against a chalice, but no occult hand is here to hold me, to steady me as I spill. I glisten against a soft grey sky.

I tell myself that tears are healthy, and give myself over to them, bathe in this shame.

I am weeping without sainthood, and no dove offers me a communion wafer. I am weeping without sainthood, offering a history of tears in lieu of my own ugly anecdotes. I am a selfish child, always wanting, greedily. I am unwilling to accept responsibility, to grow up. I am ruining the substitute teacher’s day, making it harder for my lover to leave me, undermining the disciplinary process, making dialogue difficult, disrupting the vacation. I have flooded a valley; only the church’s steeple is visible above the waterline. I have drowned the sunflowers, overwatered all the fruit. I am unrestrained, disorderly, spoilt and ungrateful. I am looking over a drowned world of my own creation; I did not transform water into wine. I am childish; I am not a child; I need to pull myself together. I am irrational, inconsolable, and always weeping without sainthood.

I read the Ace of Cups as a symbol of unattainable perfection. Love, like a chalice, can be a vessel of alchemical transformation.

But, in the legend of King Arthur, almost every knight died while seeking the Holy Grail.

I feel, at the base of it, an envy for the saints, the mystics. They are crying because of a holy presence whereas I am crying because of a mother’s absence, a lover’s absence, because of all the ramifications of childhood loss.

The saints, in longing for God, are longing for a void, something they cannot access or truly know. This is what I am longing for, too, I think: a mother who is, who can only be, an absence, abstract. I cannot offer anecdotes to explain the relationship. Show, not tell, as the cliché goes, but motherlessness is invisible, ineffable, yet as constant as air. If any simile might serve it, motherlessness is akin to the evaporation of tears; my mother vanishes as tears evaporate, spectres on the threshold of the eye, at the edge of vision.

‘We are inconsolable because we have no one to speak to’, wrote E. M. Cioran.

It is painful to cry over my mother, because I know that tears won’t bring her back, that there is no possibility of communion. I wonder if what I envy is the certainty of saints, the fact that they are always loved, loved by an invisible force, and that, for them, is enough. The mystic suffers and is redeemed, but there’s no redemption for the motherless girl. I envy the mystics because they have faith in a world beyond this one, because they have such faith in God’s love that they don’t need earthly love at all.

There is fertility in overflow; water lilies, after all, grow.

I struggle to pay as much attention to the Nine of Swords as the Ace of Cups. ‘It is a card of utter desolation’, writes A.E. Waite, and for a long time I think that’s all there is to it, really; I think I understand it because I recognise the pain.

This is the only card in the Waite-Smith deck that actually depicts a figure crying. If the Ace of Cup offers weeping in the abstract, an idealised version of crying, a vision of feeling as portal to the heavens, the Nine of Swords shows crying as it is, lonely and debilitating. The figure is shown kneeling on a bed, shoulders hunched and head in hands, before a dark wall, nine horizontal swords above them.

Swords, in tarot, are aligned with air, with thinking rather than feeling. The sword, like the mind, is cutting, and its power depends on the person who wields it, on their abilities and intentions. ‘Just as air constantly moves, so the mind never rests, twisting and turning, sometimes violent’, writes Rachel Pollack.

I think of a sword, slicing through space, cutting flesh and words.

The swords on this card, though, hover, untouched, heavy and yet suspended in the night.