So, I’ve been walking outside a lot.

The last few weeks have been nothing if not… hard. Full of loss. Disappointing, in ways that are too huge to be encapsulated by that little word.

I have a hard time recovering from loss. Usually I just write it all out. But over the past weeks it is hard to know what to say about any of it  – deaths, near deaths, anniversaries of deaths and lives that have never taken shape. I have mostly said and written nothing to honor other peoples’ privacy,

But on my part, there have been a lot tears. Snotty, torrents of tears. Oh, the tears. I cry and I cry and I cry.

Oh, and sometimes I cry.

Tears. My foe. And my friend. My release. My eyes well up so easily that the need for Kleenex is a joke the Byron and I have.

“Again,” he says, at Walgreens, when we are in the tissue aisle. “You are out already?”

“I cry a lot,” I say. And it is true.

But I feel lucky to have emotions, especially after a conversation with a friend who said, “I wish I could cry. My antidepressants make it impossible.” She squeezed my hand in her fist and said, “I envy tears.”

Mine come freely enough that I am ashamed of them sometimes. I want to put the covers over my head and not let people see how often I need a good, deep cry.

But with this pledge that I have made, I have to get out and walk a fucking mile every day of my life. So I have been taking the covers off and just doing it.

More than once I have slapped on sunglasses, cursing both my sister and my mother, and just walked, crying the whole way.  Once I was crying so hard that I had to stop in a doorway to wipe my nose and calm down.

That was on the way out the door. The interesting thing is that I have never walked my mile and come home crying.

On the way home I always realize: I feel good. I hear birds chirping. I notice that the sun is shining. But it does take a while.

At least a mile, I have found.

Once, on my way home after one of my cry-fests, I saw her, clear as day. A woman walking towards me wearing sunglasses and bawling her eyes out.

She was having her own moment with herself.

She was walking it off.

I was so proud of both of us.