the antidote for forgetting

she kept crying as she walked into the airport. she cried as she was checking in and as she was going through security. she cried as she waited, she cried on the plane. earlier that day, as he smoked a cigarette through the noisy vertical blinds and she lay on his bed, warm and settled in their sheets, when they talked about her moving and the only rational thing to do, she thought, how easy. how mature, how right. we're doing what we have to do, it would be impossible to do anything other than this- say goodbye today. but as he was taking a shower and as she was still laying there she noticed the way he lined his shoes up, three perfect pairs in a row with the heels against the wall. it took her a beat to realize that they had been this way all along, all ten months of their relationship. his shoes had always been neatly lined up no matter what the rest of the room looked like, and she was only just then noticing it. and she began looking around at the way the towel hung from the nail and the way the corner of the picture curled up. and these parts of the room that she had grown to know so intimately became parts of him, parts of them, parts that she could, feasibly, forget. because maybe she had always known about his shoes, maybe she had always known the way his upperlip quivered a little bit when he drank out of a straw. and maybe the threat of losing those parts, those bones that connected to form him and to form what had been, was what suddenly made her need them. it was all of the goodbyes, to the stench of his elevator, the broken stair. not goodbye to the composite but to all the hundreds of parts- the silly computer game and the way he kissed her forhead. the twitchy dreams he had and how he bit his nails.
and it was then, only after she saw it that way, that the rationality and correctness of their decision disentegrated and it just turned sad. it was the kind of sad that had no limit because no matter how hard you cried about one thing, there was another detail somewhere to dig up and cry about more. it was as if her tears were the antidote for forgetting, the more she cried the more real it all was, the more present it was inside of her. if she could still cry about it, then it still existed.
when she was 11 years old she saw a woman crying at the chinese restaurant she and her mom always went to on friday nights.the place was usually empty but that night there was a woman sitting in a booth with what appeared to be her son.they had just been served when the crying began. the woman looked like she was about to stand, her legs were out from underneath the table and her hands were flat on her lap, like she was going to use them to push herself up. but she was sobbing, heaving deep sobs, and her little boy just stared ahead, confused and scared. the chef and owner of the place came out and put his hand on her back.
her mother told her not to stare, that it was a sad situation and that she hoped they got home ok. but it was the first time that she had ever seen a person cry like that, that rawly, that spontaneously. the woman kept crying, even after more staff came out and they called her a taxi. it was devastation, pure desparation, no matter what the actual origin of the tears. it was stark and beautiful and alive, and watching it made her understand how deeply things live in us, how many layers there really are.
that seeing a plate of sweet and sour chicken could make her cry that way.