I didn't cry for eleven years. Then I did.

The last time I cried I was twenty-six, standing at my father's cremation with my uncles on either side of me. One of them put his hand on my back and said, quietly, that I was the man of the house now. I stopped crying right then. I didn't start again for eleven years.

It wasn't a decision. Nobody decides that. It was more like a door that closed while I wasn't looking. My mother got older. My sister got married. I moved to the city, got a good job, got a better one. People would tell me sad things and I would nod and say the right words and feel nothing in my chest at all. I thought that meant I was strong.

The night it opened again was a Tuesday. A deployment had gone badly, nothing serious, the kind of thing that happens twice a month. I walked down to the parking garage, got into the car, and could not turn the key. I sat in the car with the engine off and cried until the windows fogged. Forty minutes. A security guard knocked on the glass to see if I was alive.

I wasn't crying about the deployment. I'm still not completely sure what it was. My father, I think. Eleven years of things I put in a room and locked.

What changed

I told one friend. Only one. He didn't say anything clever. He just said, me too, a couple of years ago, and we sat there with our tea going cold. That was enough to make me feel less like something was broken.

I won't pretend I'm fixed. But I don't think of that door as strength anymore. I think of it as a room I was too afraid to clean.