Rain down on me Shedding tears to spite my face BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

I am allergic to my own tears.

I knew early on my body was sensitive — irritated, actually, by things like milk (we always blamed that on my mother), wheat, citrus, pollen, yeast, MSG, and countless other things I can only imagine produce the swelling under my eyes or in my abdomen that I’ve come to know better than I’d like. Having allergies has never been a blast — and there are times, since none of these will actually kill me (unfortunately?), that I practice a little je m’en foutisme ("I don’t give a fuck") and eat bread and dairy that’s served to me because explaining my situation to a hostess would be a bigger pain in my ass than having the runs for two days.

But I didn’t realize the tear thing until I was in college and broke up with my Italian long-distance boyfriend, who had moved to the US that year to be closer to me and to get a master’s at Princeton. We both knew we were in no man’s land; the seven years between us stretched like an unsurpassable gulf as I began my sophomore year in college and he got yet another degree. We both knew the tidal-effects distance, both real and imagined, would pull us under.

He had taken up for a time while in London with a Russian whose name was the Russian version of my own. I had developed a crush on my best friend who turned out to be gay. That fall, I had fallen for one of the students I TA’ed in French, and I knew it was over. Yet we had been such good friends — or so I realized as we talked about what all this meant.

And the tears began. Softly at first and then later unstoppable as I crawled under the red quilt my mother had stitched together for me when I was six as a Christmas present and a roommate came to sleep with me in my single bed, huddled next to me as I cried all night long.

In the morning, I went to the mirror and realized I had transformed into Jabba the Hut over night. My face was so swollen, one of my roommates didn’t even recognize me when she came in, herself bleary eyed, to brush her teeth. That day I would have given anything for a Birkha, but, instead, I secluded myself in my room pressing ice cubes to my face.

Over the years I’ve tried to monitor the tear thing with cold compresses and peppermint tea bags in the fridge. But nothing works better than just not crying a single drop, even when shit happens. Of course, some things we just are not equipped to do, even for vanity.

This spring, as the weather has seemed determined to drop like sheets from the sky and give us very little reprieve from what we became so tired of this winter, I’ve been wrestling the tear thing more than I’d like. Something about the change of seasons and then so little sun has seemed to bring out catastrophe.

A fight with my mother left me gaspy and teary at the unfortunate time of driving north to shoot a film the next morning. Sensitive to how I look on film, I spent the night dousing my face in ice cold water, lying with tea bags on my eyes, getting up to do downward facing dogs, upward facing dogs, cobras, and camels, and then repeating it all again in the early-morning hours long before I needed to be on set.

It all moderately worked, but I had to do something called acting and get over my eyes (but I also was smart enough to make friendly with the make-up artist).

There are the real and imagined tears, of course, that we as actors who try to lead lives with real people all know. On stage, we will cry for some weird combination of our character’s hurts and our own with as much if not more verve than we would in lives that tell us, like the Iris Dement song, we got no time to cry. I recently saw a friend of mine over at Portland Stage in Dinner with Friends, a play about a marriage coming apart at the seams. Somehow it leaves the friend, whose marriage stays in tact, more vulnerable than the people who actually divorce. On stage, she cries for the fissures that now seem all too apparent in her own perfect life, and she cries for everything that might be lost.

My friend Golda told me she put me in her screenplay about a woman who cries all the time after I told her about a recent weekend where I had cried for 36 hours straight with little reprieve for sleep. The tears had begun early in the evening, over fish and white wine when cowboy told me he had decided, as all men must, to go west in the fall. At first I think I cried from surprise, then just for all that might be. Later, in the dark wee hours of the AM, Cowboy was dispatched regularly to the bathroom for more tissues and a washcloth soaked in cold water as I tried to make myself stop gushing. It all came out, everything I had been storing through a long cold winter, with the force and severity of the sky coming down for the past four depressing weeks. Like a visitor, I passed through the next days of my life with swollen eyes that seemed more true than a face that showed nothing, because it was my own.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com