I have never made you cry. I’ve heard you cry over the phone, and I’ve read when you said you were crying while we were chatting on the internet. But I have never actually seen you cry. Until tonight.
I didn’t mean to make you cry. And I didn’t want to make you cry, even though I’ve always secretly wondered what it would be like if you did and I was around to talk to you, to try and make you feel better. But I never thought I would be.
You said you didn’t know if you were going to make it through the night without crying. I think half of me wasn’t sure you would, but the other half didn’t really think you would cry; and it’s not because you’re a wimp or not manly. You just don’t seem to be the crying type. Not when someone would first look at you anyways. I think part of me believed you actually never did cry, since I had never seen it and only heard it. But now I believe you.
I know you’re sensitive, but I also know you’re not a wimp. I would never think of you as one, and I feel sorry for anyone that would think you are. They obviously don’t know you.
I wish I could have hugged you when you were crying. I wanted to reach over and hug you and tell you everything would be alright. But all I did was keep running my hand along your arm, or sometimes your wrist. I didn’t even hold your hand.
It wouldn’t have been that bad, if it wouldn’t have been the reason you were crying. But it was. It was because I’m afraid of you, and you think I’ll always be afraid of you. You think I’ll never get over it, and that we’ll never get past occasionally holding hands. But you know what? For once in your life, you’re wrong.
You asked me what you could do when we were sitting there. You asked what you could do to make me less afraid of you; you said you would do anything even though it wasn’t your fault that I was afraid, even though it was because of a dream. You still would have done anything.
I told you I didn’t need you to do anything though. I just shook my head a little, trying not to let anyone see us talking, trying to hide that there was something wrong. I might have been wrong to be afraid of even that, but I didn’t say you didn’t have to do anything just so you would stop asking me.
You had already done something. You cried. And even though a lot of people would just be disgusted, I wasn’t. That was all I needed. I didn’t do anything tonight because I was trying to ignore the fact, but I can’t get away from it.
I can’t get your face out of my mind. Your face with a streak across the side of your face where a tear had fallen down on your sweater. Your face as you tried to hold the tears in, so you wouldn’t cry in front of everyone. Your face as you gave up for a second and just let a few tears escape down the trail the others had taken…
But there’s another face I don’t think I can forget, and that’s your face when we were on the bus trip to Youth Challenge a few months ago, when we held hands and I leaned on your shoulder…that’s the other face that, as hard as I try, I just can’t forget, and I know it can be like that again…I just have to let it.
And as long as I don’t forget your face tonight when you were crying, I think it will be pretty easy, too.