Reason for Living #5: Tears, Poetry

guest essay by Christopher Fleitas

Today’s guest essayist on REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang is Christopher Fleitas.

Christopher Fleitas is a high school English teacher with a literary interest in revenge and a penchant for silliness. In 2023, he was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of bone marrow cancer, which began a long journey that continues to this day—though, thankfully, the cancer is gone. (Knock on wood.) He loves Beowulf, The Remains of the Day, EPCOT and Disneyworld in general, karaoke, and hojicha frappes from Japantown.

the brilliant Christopher Fleitas, with an egg

I can’t cry. At least not right now, and for some months now. I don’t necessarily mean this as a comment on my emotional state, though various medications do have me more sanguine, or more peevish, than my old cry-to-Folklore-on-280-after-a-grueling-day-at-work self.

My eyes just physically haven’t produced tears in some time, as part of a general bodily campaign of withholding moisture from spots that would normally like to have some. This, like most of what’s wrong with me right now, is a result of graft vs host disease (GVHD), by which my robust new immune system messes with my scraggly old body like a cat knocking things off a counter to see how much it can get away with before you find the spray bottle. In this analogy, the spray bottle is high-dose steroids, which tend to cause their own problems, like spritzing your counter with hydrochloric acid to make the cat move.

There’s a test one ophthalmologist ran where they put an absorbent sticker that doubled as a ruler on the inner corner of each eye, then had me sit quietly and alone in the dark for five minutes to see how much wetness had accumulated. As I sat, I could not help but think of the bumper sticker that doubled as a ruler on the inner hull of my grandpa’s small fishing boat. When you brought in a trout or redfish that might not be long enough to legally keep, you streeeeeetched it out against the sticker to see if you were going to plorp it overboard or into the ice chest to thump for awhile. Small me spent a long time looking at that sticker, fascinated by its slogan, which I still recall: THE CORRECT LONGITUDE GIVES MORE LATITUDE TO THE GAME WARDEN’S ATTITUDE. Poetry, honestly. Alliteration, rhyme, meter. I find myself inclined to edit GIVES to LENDS to improve the prosody, but I don’t think it was so.

The eye sticker said I produced a tiny amount of moisture over five minutes. Less than a mm, if I recall (it wasn’t poetic, so I forgot the details). Toss this one back. PLORP.

You’ve surely seen enough commercials to know dry eyes are unpleasant. But extremely dry eyes quickly become borderline nonfunctional. I couldn’t drive for many months after the transplant, much longer than anyone expected. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and when I could, everything was far too blurry to feel safe, even on familiar routes. I became a permanent passenger.

The Arcade Fire’s “In the Backseat” off of their album Funeral has always resonated with me. It’s a song about being able to dodge adult responsibility and anxiety, at least for a while: “I like the peace/in the backseat/I don’t have to drive/I don’t have to speak/I can watch the countryside/and I can fall asleep.” Until recently (thanks to Lexapro and the perspective granted by deep consideration of my own mortality), I’ve always been a very nervous driver, especially in San Francisco. Prior to the last couple of months, the only time I can remember parallel parking without a gnawing sense of dread was doing it moments after being told my grandpa had died, at which point I didn’t really care if I pulled it off or wrecked the car. Just as in the song, our elders’ mortality forces us out of the backseat and behind the wheel: “I’ve been learning to drive/my whole life.” Now that my brain is finally comfortable with the front seat, my body doesn’t want me there.

The ophthalmologist can actually see the dry spots on the surface of the eye, which I found interesting. Her solution was something called punctal plugs, tiny golf-tee shaped devices that block the tear duct so the eye will retain the moisture from the many eyedrops I put in throughout the day. Mostly single-dose Refresh Plus (the cup holders of my car look like the aftermath of a cinematic firefight, overflowing with spent shells), but also—in by far the raddest development of my GVDH experience—eyedrops made from serum centrifuged from my own blood. Eyes love this one weird trick, apparently.

The plugs dissolve or fall out after some weeks. The only way I can tell is that my eyes start involuntarily closing until I am looking at the world through slits fringed by (honestly pretty lush if I can compliment myself) eyelashes, which steadfastly refused to capitulate to chemo and which I am vain about. I notice myself tilting my head back like a snob to peer down my nose, as it’s always more uncomfortable at the top of the eye to drag the eyelid up and down. When it’s very uncomfortable, I wear a special heated eye mask. I tend to struggle with this because I have to remove myself from the world for 10 minutes to lie quietly with my eyes closed, and unless I am listening to something or about to fall asleep, I get fidgety and impatient. I’m writing this essay in some discomfort rather than using the eye mask at this very moment.

All to say, the lack of tears drives me inward. I lose peripheral vision. The familiar routes become blurred shapes. I am nudged away, painfully, from our shared world that I have been granted the chance to rejoin and back into the dimness of my own Grendelish skull-cave.

On an emotional level, my lack of tears ends up separating me from the world, making my own petty thoughts, concerns, worries, plans, and fantasies into a landscape of troubles or perhaps of comfortable complacency.

So, in this metaphor, what are the plugs? What are the bloody drops?

For me, I realize, they are poetry. Sometimes with the shock of a serum fresh out of the icebox, sometimes like a balm so pocketwarmed I can’t even tell if it went in, poetry opens my eyes to the shared experience of Whitman’s “powerful play.” I’ve understood this instinctually for a long time, I suppose; I’ve often said that reading poetry is the way I reached for and held feelings that were too big for me to lift alone. But even then I was thinking in terms of understanding my own boulders, not seeing and feeling the contours of others’. Poetry is the empathetic infusion that lets me, at least for a time, reopen my eyes and heart to the lovely, mutilated, ephemeral, eternal world, letting me take in its longitude and latitude, until one day it shall toss me too—into that chest, or overboard to swim free.

10% of the proceeds from each REASONS FOR LIVING newsletter go to an organization of the guest essayist’s choice. Chris Fleitas has chosen NMDP (formerly Be the Match). NMDP is a global nonprofit leader in cell therapy, helping save the lives of patients with blood cancers and disorders.

Please consider donating here. And if I might implore you to do take one more step, please consider signing up for the registry, especially if you’re a BIPOC person (there are far fewer BIPOC donors currently in the registry). It takes no more than mailing in a cheek swab, and you could save a life. Someone took that step, was a match for Chris, donated their bone marrow (a relatively simple procedure), and saved his life.

If you enjoyed this free edition of REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive two bonus personal essays from me per month. We also have monthly Fireside Chats, which are gatherings to discuss, play, and learn about creativity and limitations. They also help me to pay the bills, as my chronic illness and disabilities prohibit me from working a standard job.

The Day I Cannot Stop Crying

by David Graham

Speck dazzling one eye, lens glint of sun,
maybe fumes from underground engines
that power our day-whatever it is,
my nerves know this blur will last daylong,
fogging half my hours, a grief without source.

Let the turning maple swim, red and rust,
in my right eye—my left has no time
for this driveling riddle, this Weltschmerz.
I read the news with proper irony,
tidal waves against the crisp columns
of disaster, treaty, and no comment.
I'm half inclined to resurrect my soul from its lifelong torpor, to float my sins
and almost hurl myself down that dark well.

Clogged tear duct? Partial allergy? Remnant
of sorrow, lodged at last where I cannot
think it away? This welling semi-world
would seem too deep for tears were it not
lovingly abrim, and I feel yes and no
at war within, like a father seeing
his truant son take a deserved beating.

Do I sadden because I am crying
or vice versa? Do I worry the rage
of every smudged headline? Someone does or
does not slice an onion in my bad kitchen,
and I know the beam in my eye is a mote
in the camera lens of history.
But I won't cry for that. I cry despite myself,
and not because rain is the sweat
of the damned, not because good citizens
must climb the roof crests to ride out the flood
of this last hurricane’s one-eyed blinking.

To the north the thunderheads thicken—
bikinis and tennis weather from the south.
Why, when the metal of responsible life
lies sweet in sheath, must I know this split
that is itself half pain, half theatric?

I cry with half a heart that one whole eye
takes in the world’s wind, refusing to blink.

Painting by Henrik Uldalen

When was the last time you cried? Were you alone, or with others? What prompted you to cry at that moment? What does it mean to you that you cried then

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