Carte blanche to Rosalie Bonenfant | Hide this tear that I cannot see

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us their vision of the world around us. This week, we give carte blanche to Rosalie Bonenfant.

When I was born, I didn’t shed a single tear.

The nurse took my slimy little body and placed it on my exhausted mother. Quite simply, we looked at each other, getting to know each other in the utmost seriousness. No shouting to tell the obstetricians that they had just scrapped my amniotic laziness in a medium term.

This reprieve was short-lived, because I must have cried every day of my life since. I don’t hide it, I love to cry! For me, no discrimination in the activity. I indulge in short-term micro-showers as much as tidal waves that disfigure you, leaving you all blistered. One day, I actually cried so much that the facial recognition system on my iPhone no longer even recognized me.

I am lucky, in addition to slight tear incontinence, I have the mechanism of evacuation of emotion in perfect health. You see, I am one of those unfortunate few whose heightened sensitivity would even allow them to be moved by a Bengal fire on a pile of shit. Isn’t that something to be proud of? My vulnerability muscle is a real little Nadia Comaneci of flexibility! Why, then, do we still meet my harmless mood swings with discomfort?

For as long as I can remember, crying has always been relegated to the status of a problem to be solved. As a child, people tried to soothe my attacks with loud shouts of “shh, shh, shh, my baby”. Later, during a difficult heartbreak when I listened to Daniel Bélanger using his flavor, he tirelessly repeated to me “dry your tears/dry your tears my sister”.

Just recently, at the mall, a kid lost sight of his mother through these hundreds of legs animated by the frenzy of the Holidays. “Don’t cry, my little one,” a warm passer-by who stopped to help him quickly says to him. But sir, where do you want him to put his sadness if he can’t get rid of it immediately, like Tom Thumb sowing a few crumbs of emotion behind him? And when the rain bothers you, do you also ask the sky to pull itself together and take charge?

The trouble with adults is that they often wrongly believe they have solved what they have managed to silence. It’s curious. However, they know that opening your umbrella is not enough to pretend that the downpour has passed.

But they are like that; where they cannot ask anyone to stop bleeding, they will certainly know how to apply a diachylon.

As a general rule, the sight of our tears and our blood bothers people a lot. As if our truth had created a fault in their matrix. No doubt because it reminds others that inside of us, things are happening that prove that we are alive. That despite our desire to elevate ourselves to the rank of hyper-performing cyborgs, we will never be able to truly transcend this ugly human nature which still forces us to evacuate the waste of the body and the soul through the holes that have been given to us. It’s organic. Our tear apparatus is nothing more and nothing less than an integrated still to distill our moods into delicate pearls of emotion.

Nevertheless, I have difficulty explaining this collective obstinacy in wanting to conceal every breakthrough in fragility that our betrayer of the body can escape. At the slightest leak of transparency, we must justify ourselves. Have a good excuse to justify the rude outburst.

We forget that sometimes it flows just because it flows. It’s not for nothing that we have a natural drainage system in our face. Do you know what happens to water when it is improperly drained? It creates a water infiltration in your “Gyproc”, and the mold ends up getting in there!

Believe me, if the role of our eyes was to ensure the seal, someone would have already realized the manufacturing error and would have sealed the hole! (I take this opportunity to remind those who do not remember their last eye wave that they are perhaps ripe for a little examination of life. Psychologists make excellent plumbers for the accumulation of denial until we invent a sort of Drano to unblock the repression of feelings!)

So don’t blame me if I wear my tears proudly rather than systematically wiping them away. My wet face is not the testimony of an exaggerated affliction, any more than weapons of guilt flow from my eyes. My tears are the heritage of my capacity to feel. They are proof that I have the odious courage to admit that my emotion took up more space than my face could contain.

And the next time you see me crying at Pacini because a customer is being chanted “happy birthday” at the next table, no need to ask me if I’m correct; I’m just draining the excess of life!