I don't cry easily. I used to cry a lot when I was a kid. I was a pretty screwed up emotional mess then and cried all the time. (Being a screwed up mess hasn't entirely changed...only the crying part.) Now, as an adult, I'm rarely brought to tears.

My grandmother is the same way. She says it must because we are all cried out. She rationalized that we spent so many years before bawling our eyes out that at some point we finally just ran out of tears.

Sometimes I wonder if this is a bad thing, not being able to cry. Well, okay...I can cry. It just takes something very, very major to bring me to tears, like when a week before I moved to Arizona my cat never came home. I didn't know if he was dead or lost or what. I was so worried that I couldn't find him before I was to leave town. That tore me up. Luckily he came home a couple days before I left. He's not been outside since.

I remember when I went to see E.T. with a friend of mine. I was dazzled and exhilarated by the movie like any other 12 year old would be. As the credits rolled and the lights came on, I looked at my friend sitting next to me. Tears were streaming down his face. "Why are you crying?" I asked incredulously. He wiped the tears from his cheeks quickly and roughly. He said the ending was so beautiful and happy. But, I still wondered why he was crying. After all 1) it was just a movie and 2) it wasn't a sad movie at that. Back then, I associated tears with pain, loneliness, fear, shame, hopelessness and sadness. I remember he felt embarrassed about me questioning him and told me to shut up and wouldn't look at me as we left the theater. I've always felt bad about that. I wasn't trying to tease him. I just really didn't understand.

At my friends' wedding last year, I wanted to cry and during the ceremony I thought I would, but I didn't. I wanted to cry after reading Augusten Burroughs's memoir, Dry, but there was nothing. Whenever I hear the "I'll Cover You - Reprise" from Rent, I feel my eyes well up a bit and I get a lump in my throat, but no tears roll down my face.

Friday I was watching Joan of Arcadia (I have become a total sap for this show) and it had a particularly strong emotional scene. Joan's friend Adam couldn't bring himself to read his mother's three year old suicide note, so Joan's mother read it aloud to him. I was a very moving scene. They all cried; Joan, her mother and Adam, but I just sat there wondering why I wasn't.

Sometimes, I wonder if my heart had hardened and that's why I don't cry. That both scares and bothers me. That prospect alone should bring me to tears. I know I have a tendency to be cynical, but I still find pure beauty in so many things: music, art, people. I feel like I'm missing out. That there are reservoirs of love and compassion deep inside me that should be spilling over and I should be feeling all of life's wonderful and awful emotions. Truly living. But I don't. I worry that I never will.

Even writing this now, I feel the lump in my throat and my eyes sting, yet there is nothing. Maybe my grandmother was right.