Finding the Water to Cry by Jacqueline Goyette

Finding the Water to Cry

by Jacqueline Goyette

Originally published in Issue 16 of Stanchion Magazine. Winner of a 2025 Best Small Fictions Prize!

I've been crying a lot lately.

In silly moments, as we watched the end of a Netflix show the other night, both you and I -- our eyes welling up for some unknown reason, our hands grasping for each other. I held you as the credits rolled. In a day, if I count it, it's at least once. At least something brings me to tears. Yesterday it was seven times. Today only twice (so far). I don't know where the tears are finding the water to cry, although I know that my body is mostly water -- is it 60 percent? 70? -- and that water pools up and spills out, trickling its way down my cheeks, eyes turning bloodshot in the downpour. In Vienna on an April day, I spoke to my friend Corrie about it, we sat in a coffee house drinking espresso and eating warm apple strudel dusted with powdered sugar and trying, in the crowded darkness, to find a pocket for our voices. It was raining outside, perfect weather for crying. She said she remembered watching her grandmother tear up all the time in the most unusual of places and how she thought, at the time, how silly it was. How strange. Unwrapping a piece of candy, smelling a rose, reading the end of a poem out loud. But now, as we get older -- as my face looks more like my mother's face -- the tears come unexpected. For both of us. They come when no one has called for them. When no one is ready at all.

Maybe she said it just to make me feel better. That morning, in the middle of Vienna, the famous Kunsthistorisches Museum, we walked the whole of it -- four hours on our feet and walking, stopping from picture to picture, at Caravaggio's Mary in the bright red dress, beneath ornate murals painted by a young Klimt: a Cleopatra leaning toward us with her sultry eyes, gazing out at us between arches and columns. There was a salt cellar by Cellini with a gilded Poseidon, a Renaissance blue crucifixion by Albrecht Durer, a painting of Susanna and the Elders by Tintoretto that we stood in front of for ten minutes, deconstructing it on the wall of this museum in Vienna. It wasn't until we got to a painting by the high-Renaissance artist Correggio -- Jupiter and Io, part of his collection of paintings based on Ovid's Metamorphoses -- that I cried. Corrie stood and comforted me as my eyes fill with tears. It was Io's dimpled back, her love for the cloud of Jupiter, the tenderness. It was the way this felt like a love story told in one single panel. It was that no one else seemed to see the painting, but I did. We did. It was that I didn't know why I was crying, and yet here I was. And we stood there and I cried my tears, Corrie's tears, her grandmother's tears, onto the wooden floors.

(What have I forgotten? That Corrie's grandmother used to make her cucumber salad, grated and salted and a spoonful of yogurt, folded together and eaten on the side. That my grandmother would cry too, sometimes, at candies and Scrabble games and lonely afternoons thinking of my grandfather and the islands they left behind. That the poems are love poems that we read to each other, unexpected you and I -- Li Young Lee on a Sunday afternoon in the Sibillini mountains. That the first night in Vienna in that apartment with its high ceilings, its opera chandeliers, Corrie and I found the lyrics to Moon River written out in perfect cursive, and we sang “two drifters off to see the world” in little hiccup voices. That the first time I cried for you was when I couldn't tell you how sad I was, in the tongue tied and twisted Italian of my first year on this continent, in the words that wouldn't come, in how in love I was with you. So I shed tears instead. And last week, when my sister-in-law did everything wrong to us on a Tuesday afternoon, I cried for hours because you did not defend me. I cried and the cat came in and sat on my lap, sniffing at my eyelids, searching for the salt water tears of the seven seas, scratching at the blanket and humming up at me. I cried so much that I was no longer 60 percent water. I had lost half of it in that night's flood. My body was a desert with puffy eyelids and rosy cheeks.)

But the next day, My last day together with Corrie in Vienna -- that April when it rained -- it is more than crying. It is sobbing. The orchestra is playing Mozart's Piccolomini Mass in a packed church with white walls and chandeliers. The choir is singing. The earthy smell of incense is coming from the altar at a Sunday morning service. And I am weeping. Who knows why, I have my list of reasons. For my mother, who isn't here. For the way I wish she were. For the sound of the music as it plays, like it holds in itself something inherently true, like somehow it knows me and can reach me in these vibrant freckled notes. For other reasons too. For you (of course), and how I miss you. For our cat. For 20 years in Italy. 20 years of missing home. Of hearts broken and mended and broken again. 25 years of friendship with this person standing next to me, in this Baroque church in the middle of Vienna in a promise we made to each other years ago -- every year a trip together, and then CoVid, and then other things, and now, finally, here again. For the music that my mother would have loved, she would have stood here alongside both of us and smiled and shaken us and said: "Stop crying. This is Mozart. We cry for Bach, but we don't cry for Mozart." Maybe she is here. Maybe those are her arms that have me trembling, that shake me to my knees, that hold me up, just barely. For the incense, for the choir, for the fact that Corrie is crying too now (and the Viennese man behind us, whose eyes have been shut the entire time as he hums along, and then he notices we are crying -- he is about to join in). For the moment that the woman next to me offers me a tissue from her purse. Pulls it out from its plastic sleeve and hands it over, her eyes meeting mine.

She knows. Of course she knows. She has been here too. She is with us, in puddles, in storms, in entire rivers that break their banks. The endless ghosts of everyone we love, everyone we've lost, flooding up around us, pooling at our feet.

We are made of water. There is no other way.

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Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has appeared in both print and online journals, including Stanchion, trampset, Phoebe journal, JMWW, and The Forge Literary Magazine. She currently lives and teaches English in the town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.