In the ring: Goodbye versus Badbye

Crying uncontrollably in front of strangers is not fun. I have done it twice this week. Each time, there were looks of consolation, and an equal number of "she is an unstable weirdo" looks.

Monday I opened at Starbucks, my current place of employment. I was bitterly tired, for a number of reasons. One being that my alarm went off at 3:45AM!, another that I was sitting wide awake in bed at 2:15AM!, and finally because I was getting sick and was congested, and so I didn't really get very much sleep prior to 2:15. So basically I was an inner mess and an outer mess and trying to serve coffee with gusto and joy. I forgot to mention that I felt like throwing up all morning long. To add even further to the aura of messiness in my demeanor, my brother and Kim and my nephew Casey jr were going to stop by on their way to the airport to tell me goodbye. I don't know why it is called goodbye. It's not always so good. Sometimes it is, like when people are at your house really late and they aren't getting the picture that all you really want to do is go to sleep. It is a "good" by when they leave. Or if your husband has beat you for several years and you get tired of covering the bruises and lying to family and alienating friends at and also visiting the hospital for "falling off the step ladder in the kitchen" so you finally decide to leave the bastard. That is another "good" by. But when you only get to see your nephew a few times a year and you formerly lived not very far from him and actually saw him quite frequently and inevitably got severely attached to him and his lovely hugs, even the ones you had to beg him for, and then he comes and visits your daily life for about three days and reminds you of how wonderful it is to have him around and how when he is gone there really is some kind of something missing from your awake hours, when he comes by your workplace to go back home to freaking Florida, that is not a "good" bye. It just isn't. I was in fact a badbye and made me cry uncontrollably in front of all of our morning rush customers and the milk man and my coworkers and my boss and all of the insects and God too. I felt naked and vulnerable and helpless, and all I wanted to do was go into the corner of a small dark room and cry by myself until I fell asleep. But my break was only ten minutes, so instead I had to do the dishes and then go back out into the world and serve coffee. After I had regained semi-composure and was taking a woman's order at the register, she asked me how I was doing, a pretty common question to ask your barista. Wrong question to ask me. I started crying again while ringing up her latte. I tried to explain to her, in between the tears, why I was sobbing and she was gracious and kind. In that moment, I was thankful that I was in the Midwest where the majority of people are consistently friendly. I was thankful that she wasn't a man. I was also thankful that she wasn't an insensitive ass who was in a hurry to get wherever she was going and didn't have time for some idiot minimum wage earner's emotional garbage. She went to her table and enjoyed her coffee. About an hour later, when I had gained even more composure and her cup was empty, she came back up to the counter for a refill. She told me she was glad I was smiling again. So was I.

The second time I cried that week in public was the following day when I put my other equally precious nephew on the plane to go back to his home in Wisconsin. I will spare you the details, but it was sad and people were kind and I recovered, and I learned that crying uncontrollably in front of strangers is not fun.