simple enough
"Instructions on How to Sing"::Begin by breaking all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to your side, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget yourself. Sing one single note, listen to it from the inside. If you hear (but this will happen much later) something like a landscape overwhelmed with dread, bonfires between rocks with squatting half-naked silhouettes, I think you'll be well on your way, and the same if you hear a river, boats painted yellow and black are coming down it, if you hear the smell of fresh bread, the shadow of a horse.::
--Julio Cortazar
***
"My Own Instructions for Crying (With Apologies to Julio Cortazar)"
::Sit on your bed. It should be disheveled; it probably is, anyway, right? Be honest. Look at it. Look at it! The crooked spread, the lumps of sheet beneath and the untucked blankets! Look around, see everything: the lint on the floor, the balls of hardened Kleenex. Is it all revealed by the spring sunlight, which you are trying to soften by not raising the blinds. Aren't you?
The cry won't come, like the sneeze, the traveling itch you, frantic, can't even find. Say it: like the climax.
When you were a kid, clattering down the attic stairs dragging a peacock fan or a pair of gilt angel wings, a mask in the shape of a dog's head, calling down to someone you could almost see, whirling around the corner you smacked your skull on the sharp-angled ceiling that overhung the stairs. You cried then, fast and hard like rain that fell while the sun still shone. It hardly hurt until later, and you laughed, the tears still on your face.
What you think of now, to force the tightening in your throat, is of course, the man in question. But which man -- the current, the recent, or the deep past? Go for the jugular, the aorta. Bite deep, remember, whatever it is: cut of cheekbone, glint of hair; phrase of music, slant of light. Skin on your skin and his voice, resonant in your bones. Let the taste of him fill your body and then turn sharply back to this place, your morning room.
It's not even his absence -- it's the freefall of having had him, the lunge off the step you thought was there.
If all that proves merely dreary, think this: you and he are beyond gender, two human hearts, two souls in proximity. half-visible to one another but not touching, not able to touch, sliding discreetly past each other on the stairwell. Don't think, how can that be? Think, that's why one doesn't cry.::
--Penelope Bone