Why I cry at ads but not at things that matter

The first time I noticed it, I was thirty-one, alone, and the commercial was for a brand of instant noodles I have never bought and will never buy. A father walks his daughter to the bus stand on her first day at a hostel. She forgets her steel tiffin in the kitchen. He runs back, six floors, no lift, with the tiffin. She does not turn around. He stands there. The bus leaves. He stands there with the tiffin. I cried for forty seconds, then for another twenty when the jingle came back.

The same week, a friend I have known since 2009 told me his marriage was ending. We were sitting on the same side of a table at a coffee place near my house. I asked the correct questions. I felt the correct things, at the correct distance. I did not cry, then or later. I made a small, firm mental note to text him on Sunday, and then I did not text him on Sunday. I did not text him for a long time.

The advertisement asked nothing of me except to be moved. The friend, somehow, asked more.

— the working theory

There are two theories. The first one is about distance. The argument goes like this: the noodle dad lives at a perfectly safe distance from me. He is a fiction, a frame, a face inside a sixty-second box. I can pour grief into the box and the box does not pour anything back. The friend across the table is not in a box. The friend is two feet away. He has a life I can touch. If I cry, the crying becomes a thing in the room that he has to manage, on top of the marriage.

The second theory is about shame. It goes like this: I do not cry in front of the friend because, somewhere deep, I am ashamed that I am not crying. I do not feel enough, fast enough, and that absence itself is the thing I cannot let him see. So I keep my face still. I ask the correct questions. I run through the playbook I have practiced in showers, in autos, in stairwells, since I was twelve.

A small, uncharitable aside

Neither theory makes me look good. The first one says I am only capable of feeling things when there is no risk attached to them. The second says I am performing my own emotional life in real time, and the performance is mostly designed to protect me from being seen as inadequate. Both of those can be true at once. I think they probably are.

What I know for sure: eight weeks later, when I finally did text him, he wrote back, "you took a while." I wrote back, "I'm sorry." He wrote, "it's okay." I do not think it was okay. I think he was being generous, because that is the kind of person he is, and because the version of the friendship we both wanted to protect required, that day, a small lie.

I am still crying at advertisements. I do not think this is going to stop. Last week it was an insurance ad, of all things — a man with grey hair calling his mother about a leaking tap, but you understood, somehow, that the tap was not really what he was calling about. Forty seconds, then twenty more. The tap was not really what he was calling about.

I have not yet learned to call my own mother about her taps. I have learned, only, how to cry about a stranger's.