I was a crybaby as a kid. Actually– let me rephrase that. I was a little… sensitive. Some people might not agree with my use of that qualifying word, “little.” Every adult in my life used to tell me that I was too emotional, too sensitive. And maybe I was, but… I was also a child. I always felt that my emotions were too big for my little body, like they filled me all the way up, as if I were a vessel. But sometimes, the vessel would be jostled. And some of that liquid emotion, syrupy and sticky and sour, would… spill out. It made a mess, always. But grown-ups don’t like mess. They yell and curse when something spills. It’s another thing to clean up. And I’d spill my emotion on things that weren’t meant to be tainted– games and jokes and teasing little comments that they were hoping to forget after the fact.

As I got older, my vessel grew. My capacity for emotion– my ability to stop the spill– got stronger. Then sometimes, someone didn’t just jostle me. They filled it up a little more, usually not all the way to the top, but enough that I was worried about spilling. Sometimes, it wasn’t even a person who’d fill it up, but a series of uncontrollable circumstances. The world shut down with the pandemic when I was nineteen, and suddenly I was full.

I found that shortly after this shut down, my vessel did the same. It froze. Locked itself up with a lid and a latch so that nothing could come out. And shortly after that nothing was real, and I couldn’t go about my day without feeling as if I were dreaming. I was really, really scared by it. I remember this one time, on a drive with my sister, I was sitting in the passenger seat, my hand out the window, waving in the wind, you know, like they do in movies– and I was hit by that feeling of unreality. Or, I guess it’s less of a hit of something and more of a sucking out of everything, an hourglass suddenly devoid of sand. The lid was on, air-sealed, immovable. I was in this state where nothing felt real, and I looked at my hand out the window. And it was made of clay. It wasn’t mine. It didn’t belong to a body, it was an image out of a movie that was being filmed by the camera in my head, separated from anything tangible. And I’d go to work, feeling like a simulation of a person, empty and fictional and synthetic. But I always snapped out of it after a minute, or an hour, or a week. Then that state became less frequent, like the lid was opening slowly and laboriously, crack by crack.

In the summer, my grandmother died. It was the first death– the first human one, anyway, that I’d ever experienced. I’d lost pets, and I’d known of people that had died, but it was never someone so close to me, someone who I loved so dearly. And yes, I’m lucky: twenty years old and experiencing death for the first time. And as much as I’d cried in my childhood, I had never cried as much as I did the night she died. She’d had a lot of medical issues in the past. The woman had half a lung by the time she passed… not one and a half lungs, one half of one lung, the half that was left over from the cancer. She’d also had breast cancer. Twice. Every Christmas for the past five years was prefaced with the same statement from my father: “This might be the last one with Grandma.” I was prepared. I thought I was prepared.

When we got home from the hospital, she was still alive. The four of us– my sister, my parents, and I– sat in silence in our living room for a while before turning on Pineapple Express. Something to lighten the mood. Stoner humor, ha ha. Fifteen minutes into the movie, Dad got a call from my uncle. “Mom’s not breathing. I’m over an hour away. Can you get back to the hospital?” I wanted to go with them. So badly. I knew that going with would be devastating, but anything beat sitting at home and waiting for a call. And I knew what the call was going to be. I knew that when they broke the news to me, I wouldn’t be there to hug them. I would have to wait for them to get home, however many hours later. My sister and I stayed in the living room for an hour and a half, pacing. And we couldn’t do anything to pass the time, nothing felt appropriate. Why bother entertaining myself when the worst thing that had ever happened to me was happening, and I was just waiting to receive the news of it, the confirmation that it had actually happened?

Around eleven o’clock I got a call from my mom. I put her on speakerphone so my sister could hear. And she confirmed that the awful thing had happened, but that they had things they needed to do with the hospital and that she couldn’t stay on the phone, and that they didn’t know when they’d be home. We told each other that we loved each other and she asked if we were okay, and we lied. Then we asked her if she was okay, and she lied. And she hung up. I wanted to stay up downstairs and wait for them to get home. I didn’t want to be alone. But my sister is a private griever. She retreated to her bedroom. Eventually, I got tired of waiting for them to come home and went to bed.

That night, and the days following it, were bad days for my vessel. It was shaken every which way, put on its side and upside down, jostled like an open paint can in a pneumatic shaker. And a week or two later, the vessel was empty. Not a single drop left. I’d shake it myself, wishing for something to come out. But nothing did. I felt numb. And I said to my mom, a few days after she’d passed, that I’d stopped feeling. That nothing felt real. Her death was a fact, nothing more. It had no emotional weight to it. Like, fact: Grandma died. As if it were an inconsequential comment in the morning news, or an interesting something-or-other that a friend had relayed to me as we lay on our backs on my bedroom floor, staring at our phones. Fact: Grandma died. Fact: I was never going to see her again. Fact: I’d never spend another Christmas eating her rock-hard chocolate-chip cookies. Fact: None of that made me feel anything. I felt like my crying was a performance. My body understood the nature of what was happening, but my brain didn’t.

But then a few months passed, and I started to notice something about my vessel. It felt empty and full at the same time, shaken and still, open and closed. I found that it was just… existing… oxymoronically. I looked into it for the first time in a long time, peering at the bottom. Trying to, anyway. But only trying, you see, because I noticed that my vessel no longer had a bottom. It was like Mary Poppins’ bag, like someone had replaced the wooden bottom of this barrel with a black hole. It was then that I realized I hadn’t cried, not really cried, in months. The little girl whose vessel was once too small for all of her emotion suddenly had a bottomless one and was forced to wrestle anything out of it. I haven’t sobbed in a long time. Because after that, after losing someone, everything else seems trivial. I haven’t yet experienced a pain greater than that. Other reasons to cry suddenly seem undeserving of the energy. Like I’d be insulting her to cry over anything else.

So here I am, stuck with a bottomless emotional vessel, waiting for the next time something really bad happens just so I can cry again. I have moments. I can feel the vessel fill up, almost to the tippy-top and about to spill over. And then, as if someone attached a vacuum to the bottom of the barrel, it’s gone. And I remember that nothing matters but her, but her death and what I’m left with. And I know that I got something out of this. I can almost point to it, far away and blurry, I know it’s there. But I can’t make out what it is. What did I get out of this? Grief? A sense of loss? What can I take away? I know that’s the grief talking, the disassociated part of my brain refusing to accept the fact that she’s gone. But sometimes, I’m terrified that all I can take away from this is that I don’t think I’ll ever finish Pineapple Express.