Two things reminded me of Heather Christle's poem, "The Aesthetics of Crying:" one was the memory of me dancing while doing dishes yesterday, and the other was the crying photo Rose McGowan posted to Twitter yesterday beside a brief note about her loss of faith in the Democratic party after their general response to Tara Reade's sexual harassment allegations against Joe Biden.

You can find Christle's poem, I think, in The Crying Book, available at local bookstores.

A few notes:

• I'm not sure that Christle's poem offers any sort of thesis about crying, but I'm interested in a few of the truths she illuminates in this understated, quietly funny, and surprising poem. The first (and best) line establishes the poem's logic and one of its major truths: "You meet someone and later you meet / their dancing." We meet and like people (normally) when they're on their best behavior, or when they're performing their preferred version of themselves. Then we see how they express emotion, which is often seen as a somehow more distilled expression of their being, and then we must consider whether we fully accept them. That's all well and good and sloshing with tea when we're the ones judging others, but when we turn the mirror back on ourselves, as the speaker in this poem does during her crying session, we realize we're no different from the people we're judging: "but let the record show / my horrible face."

• Another minor thought in the poem helps me understand why I find McGowan's tweet—a crying selfie—so jarring. Crying is so often a private matter that's directed inward, and anger is directed outward, which is why "It’s hard to know / what you look like when you’re mad," as Christle writes. So when someone else's crying is directed outward, it's still kind of shocking, even in a social media age where the order of introductions has long been reversed: we often meet someone's dancing, and then we meet them.