You were born facing the wrong direction. Later you joked it was because you didn’t want to see the world as you came into it. You said that would have been too much. 

You cried when they flipped you over. Your mom tried to quell your wails, but the doctor told her to let you cry. “You’ll have all the time in the world to try to make her stop crying.” 

She shushed as you cried when you fell off of the playground. You cried when they brought home another baby, and she pretended like you were just too excited. You cried when they told you your dad was in the hospital. She took you out for ice cream.

At some point you stopped crying. 

You can’t say if it was because you were told “it’s okay, you don’t have to cry,” too many times or if it was because you ran out of tears too young. Still, by your twelfth birthday you had turned your back on tears.

When one of your closest friends told you “at least my dad isn’t dead,” you didn’t cry about it. You kicked him in the balls and ran for the schoolyard fence. The principal made you apologize; the only thing you were sorry for was letting him get under your skin. When the dentist told you they were going to have to take out your wisdom teeth at thirteen you only gritted your teeth and dreaded the taste the drills would leave in your mouth. 

At one point you couldn’t stop crying.

By the time you turned sixteen you would spend much of your time looking towards the ceiling and blinking rapidly. Maybe the tears would retreat back into your eye. You said it must be the hormones, “puberty can do that to girls,” but everyone saw the way your shoulders sagged. 

When a girl pulled you by the back of the hair, knocking you to the floor in front of the entire cafeteria, you did not yell at the girl. You ran to the bathroom, tucked your feet onto the toilet seat and waited for the final bell. When your mom was too busy at work and missed your jazz performance, you played your sax solo in Autumn Leaves blind. You couldn’t see the chord changes through your tears. 

You thought you had reached a happy medium, tears when they were called for and silence the rest of the time. Yet, the tears have returned.

You sit behind your desk, suppressing the sobs begging to rise in your chest. You never could quite smother the feeling, just the response. You want to cry for all of the things you never did. You stopped playing saxophone when you graduated high school. The clack of the keys sounded like your band director’s harsh words.

“You will never be a musician.”

Your old saxophone still waits under your bed. There is no room to shove it in a closet. You don’t have a closet in your shoebox apartment. You used to say you were going to play in the New York Philharmonic.

You broke up with your boyfriend because you couldn’t imagine anyone could love you the way he said he did. You still have the flowers he bought you, dried and sitting in a dusty jar on your window sill. You look at the photos he posts with his new girlfriend and imagine he still smiles at you like that. You think about texting him, but you know the words would come out wrong.

Now you look across the call center. Everyone has the same dead-eyed look. You can almost hear the cries they hold within their own chests. You think of the “work” you do: sitting at a desk all day, calling numbers on a list and trying to sell them some bull-shit supplements. You imagine what the rest of them did to end up here: a college sporting accident, a teen pregnancy, any number of minor mistakes. You wonder how you got here. There never was quite one thing you could point to. Never one misstep or wrong turn. It was every step and every turn. It was as if you were made for another, softer world.

You feel the tears start to drip down your face. Scattering across your keyboard. You can’t do it anymore. What is a thirty-year-old college graduate doing sitting behind some desk pedaling chalk as medicine? 

For the first time in your life, you scream instead of crying. It’s four p.m. on a Friday and instead of waiting for the clock to tick down to a weekend of lying in your bed, you screech and howl and holler, but it’s not quite enough. You jump onto your chair and begin climbing from desk to desk. 

You are an animal in the jungle, an orangutan released in the city, King Kong ascending the Empire State Building. You are being chased by security. 

You climb over stacks of paper, nearly kicking a coworker in the face. You can’t recall his name. You never did talk to your coworkers. You’re nearing the end of the room. You can see the elevator doors beginning to open. A towering security guard is closing in on your left, another on your right. 

You jump from the cubicle and you think you’re flying. He grabs you around the waist. You never hit the ground. You fling your arms and legs wildly trying to shake them off. If you can only make it to the elevator you will finally be free. They hold your arms and legs down. The stiff carpet digs into your skin.

They put you in the hospital. All you can do is laugh and mumble about how you can turn into animals. Everyone says you went crazy. I miss you. They let me see you sometimes. I don’t think you know who I am. Every time I visit you they make me go through security that puts the TSA to shame. They say they might be able to fix you, but you might forget some things. It’s some experimental treatment. I write this all down for you so maybe one day I will get to speak to my sister again.