The difference between a cry and a work

Everything in this book was written on a phone, in the moment, with nothing edited afterwards. I am not a poet and I am not an artist. These are not works. They are cries, written down as they came, in a season when several people I loved died inside a little over a year, some suddenly and some slowly, and my mother among them after a long illness that we walked together to its end.

I do not stand by what I wrote. I certainly do not stand against it. It is what was true at the moment it was written, and that is all it claims.

So why show it? Because in the dark I was looking for two things and found them in other people's pages: the light that is still there when everything else has gone out, and what I came to call the courage to be a coward. The permission to not be strong. To say the small, ridiculous, honest thing instead of the brave one. If a single cry in here gives someone that permission, it has done more than it was ever meant to.

This is not a judgment of anyone who only cries. God knows I cried tons between the pages of the books on the shelf here; the tree of ink grew from the tears of my face. It is a commendation of a process: write it down, right then, without fixing it. By saying something good of what I did, I am saying nothing at all about what I did not do.

Some names here are a letter and a dash, the way Hugo wrote the Bishop of D--. Some details are changed so that no one can be found through them. There are no dates anywhere, on purpose. What is left is the experience, and the experience is the point; the medium never mattered much.

If you are in a season like that one, you could do the same. A notebook, a phone, whatever is in your hand. Write the cry down. Do not fix it. Keep it. Later, if you want, read it back and see what held you up.

— B. Myriel