Imagine you are a young woman. Imagine you want to cry, but you can’t, because of a sickness where your eyes make flies instead of tears. You’ve had this illness since the day you first turned into an adult, but you don’t remember that day because you don’t remember a day in your life when it was okay for you to cry. Every time you cry, flies come out of your eyes, and they are loud and brash with the freshness of being alive and they destroy everything: subway rides, dinner parties, family outings, relationships, silence, you name it.

You learned this the hard way. When your boyfriend of one year cheated on you, he admitted it was because you told him about this inane Kafkaesque malady of yours and that ever since then, he’d wanted to test it to see if it was true. In order to do that, he had to prod you a bit, intentionally. In return, your flies ended up chasing him for the better part of a week until he showed up wild and unkempt at the foot of your brownstone stoop, groveling not just for forgiveness but more importantly deliverance from flies. It was early morning, but he was unshaven, his shirtsleeves torn, he carried an offering: that coffee maker you had been eyeballing at Target. You took the coffee maker. He tried to hold your hand through the screen door. You didn’t have the heart to give anything he requested—your forgiveness, your hand, your acknowledgment that he was still a good guy. You shut the door and locked it. Then you moved away from that city, all the way west, to another coast where he would never find you. You couldn’t risk another fly infestation, and besides, you didn’t even know how to control the flies once they were loose in the world. Your preferred solution was to open the windows and set them free.

Years later, perusing The New York Times, you came across the headline “Four Bees Living in Her Eye, Feeding on Her Tears.” It was the story of a Taipei woman who went to the doctor for a sharp pain in her eye after Tomb-Sweeping Day. She’d spent the weekend traveling to her ancestral grave site, weeding around the gravestones of her family plot, offering incense and pears. A gust blew something into her eye, and she thought it was soil or sand, so she rinsed her eye with clean water. But the water did nothing—her eye kept swelling painfully, so she went to the hospital. Under a microscope, her doctor plucked out four tiny bees from under her eyelids, bathing in her tear ducts. The sweat bees had been feeding on the salt and moisture of her tears, and all four of them were still alive. If any of them had died inside her tear duct, she could have gone blind.

After reading the story, you couldn’t help thinking: if only your situation ended after four flies! From this story of the bee woman, you discovered that there were many more insect species that fed on tears, that this phenomenon had a name, lachryphagy—bees, butterflies, and, yes, even some flies coveted a delicious cocktail of tears. Butterflies in the Amazon drank the tears of river turtles, stingless bees slurped up crocodiles’ tears, and all these insects would swarm and feast at the prospect of a woman’s lachrymose despair. For some reason, this made you feel hopeful. Perhaps there actually was a scientific explanation for your condition, perhaps you weren’t a freak.

You turned on the Maury talk show, watched the mothers cry at the results of paternity tests, neglected daughters cry at the appearance of their lifelong absent fathers or mothers. You marveled at the naturalness of their eyes watering, even on camera, how delicate, how serene or effusive their crying was in the face of the ugly things that happened to them. You convinced yourself that their situations truly warranted their tears, and their problems were much, much worse than yours. During a lie detector episode, one woman confronted a man who ran a secret human trafficking ring she didn’t know about, and he failed the lie detector test about both his STI status and whether he slept with the sex workers he employed. During a paternity test episode, one woman found out her long-term partner was not the father of her baby, but she swore she did not sleep with anyone else. She passed the lie detector test that they administered to her. It was an immaculate conception on television. The lady glowed with emotion, but the audience booed her. Crocodile tears, one audience member said in disgust. The fallacy was what test to trust: the paternity test or the lie detector test. Indeed, the audience members were split into two groups: those who believed in miracles, and those who didn’t.

You envied people who could cry. You envied those women on television—how pretty and broken they looked with salty cheeks, inflamed and red. You envied the painterly smudges their mascara left on their faces. You envied the woman you saw crying on the long-distance bus to Philadelphia. You wondered what she was crying about: Did she take the wrong bus? Had she lost a family member? Was she going through a breakup? Either way, for a moment you were tempted to comfort her but feared that if she stopped crying, you would start. It was the best contagion and the worst contagion.

Have you ever tried to sleep in a room where a single fly was buzzing? It’s impossible. Sometimes they’d land on your cheek, softly. And so the only time you’d feel the relief of silence, you’d gain the anxiety of touch. The possibility of infection. Night was when you had to avoid crying, even though to most other people, night was crying’s prime time. Other people had the luxury of crying all night, but not you. Like a sentry, you guarded your eyes, you guarded your sleep against weeping, sobbing, crying, sniveling, lamenting, ruminating, and even laughing, because more often than not for you, laughing led to flies.

But you could not always guard yourself. One day you were in line at the grocery store and the headlines of the magazines shouted about death: a pop idol you loved had just died of suicide. A single fly inched its way out of your eye, and you took out the flyswatter you always brought everywhere and killed it in front of the cashier. One day you were at the women’s health clinic and the pregnant young woman next to you told you that her partner left her when he found out. You bolted out of the waiting room to let the flies out. Another day you saw your mother trying to revive the tulips that had just died in the garden, without success, and you burst into flies.

You don’t understand—you had always kept the flies under control—you’d developed a series of techniques, expert strategies for suppressing them. Exercise: crunching your facial muscles until you resembled a dried date when you were lonely. Exercise: beating your face with a throw pillow while singing a song about survival. But then another day arrived and the person you liked stopped appearing at your doorway, stopped calling, and you were listening to the pop star that you loved who died the year before, a song not about survival but sadness, which broke the rules, which triggered a plague. Flies buzzed everywhere, and suddenly you realized you weren’t alone anymore. They buzzed like bad death metal, they buzzed like buzzards, they buzzed like the phone of someone more popular than you. They buzzed and buzzed and buzzed and buzzed until the plague touched the invisible walls around your heart you had erected after the last boyfriend gave you that coffee maker six years ago. The coffee maker had long since hissed and wheezed out its last cup of coffee, but you didn’t bother throwing it away. You wondered if you were going to be alone forever as the flies flew out of your eyes, aiming straight for the pears you left in the sun too long without eating.

Then you remembered the woman whose tears nourished the bees living in her eyes—you were the same age as her, twenty-nine. How windy that day must have been, when she tore out the weeds on the graves of her family members. Perhaps it was her grandmother who triggered the itch in her eyes—the memory of a beloved matriarch, getting more and more brittle with time. The oxalis, the wild oats, the red clover, all growing from the dirt where she lay. Maybe she had driven hundreds of miles that weekend, to see the light gleaming on the terrain above the road. Did she let herself cry out there on the mountain where her grandmother was buried? Did the wind whistle, stirring the hairy legs of the bees inside her eye? Did they scrape, scrape until she was on her knees—had she mistaken those sensations for the ghosts of her female ancestors entering her body as she swept, weeping? Did she feel hopeless—that no matter how much she swept, wept, or weeded, the tombs of her history would never be clean?

Your family once had a plot on the Mountain of the Marvelous Peak outside Beijing. The last time you visited, you were only sixteen and already at the edge of the world. Outside your grandparents’ burial site, there was a stone shrine to a fox spirit who had become a huxian, or fox transcendent. You had placed an offering there, once.

The fox had been born with a curse—that unlike other foxes, she could not shape-shift, and every time she tried, she would be swarmed with flies and ticks and wasps and ants and every affliction imaginable. So she could not join the other foxes in their quests toward transcendence, building their stores of vital essence from humans to achieve the elixir of transcendence. She avoided humans—just as she avoided romance, seduction, and enchantment, unlike her peers, who pursued the love and affection of humans until the very end.

Instead, she retreated to the mountains to study and write, carving out a perfect solace out of solitude. In her self-cultivation, she hunted rabbits and gathered fresh herbs and wild vegetables. She worshipped the Big Dipper and the Queen Mother of the West, obtaining effluvia from nature—from sun, moon, and stars, from trees, moss, and mushrooms—to build her own elixir. She lived in an abandoned pavilion next to a stream that led to your ancestor’s plot of land, drank from the same brook your ancestors drank from. She surrounded herself with the ancient texts: Spring and Summer Annals, The Classic of the Mountains and the Seas, Dream of the Red Chamber. She studied the classics, the cosmologies, the ancient and modern poetries, for a thousand years, until she reached the edge of the cosmic order. One nightfall, her wick winked out the last flame, and her inks and paints ran out. The Elixir of Immortality was complete—once she drank it, she was meant to transform, and then she would never be the same. She was so frightened that the swarm would eat her alive, but this time there were no bugs. Only a lambent column of light shattering her pavilion with its brilliance. She had finally become a huxian, a transcendent, a fox immortal with all nine tails. Of all her peers, she was the only one who became divine.

You like to think that perhaps the fox spirit had blessed you with this curse, when you touched the shrine with your fingers, when you left what you had offered, a penny or an apple core. You like to think that you would someday learn something from it, grow, though you still had no idea what, or into whom.

You decide then that you need to drive away—far, far away, into the remotest desert possible—for a crying pilgrimage. Like the fox from your ancestral village, you would read and write, would practice self-cultivation in the form of expression, release. From your home in Los Angeles, you speed across San Bernardino, Mojave, Joshua Tree, Death Valley—in the skinless 114-degree heat, you feel safe. You rent a cabin by yourself, bring groceries, plan to cook a huge meal, finish it, gnaw the chicken down to the bone, then cry as much as your heart desires, let the flies rise up above the arid open air and buzz, swirl in beautiful, bountiful circles. At night you cry under the giant bulbous stars and the flies that emerge would cry with you, multiply your crying by thousands, millions.

Flies possess compound eyes: held to a microscope, these eyes look like geodesic domes, masterful architectural marvels, with photoreceptors that can detect light and color spectrums beyond human or animal imagination. Flies have the fastest visual responses of all species on earth. You learned this on one of your despair-filled nights, the nights in the real world where you were tempted to cry and instead Googled your way through volumes of forgotten biology. If your eyes could secrete hundreds of creatures with the capacity for the fastest sight in the world, then perhaps you, too, would someday adopt this sight, which would allow you to see everything, detect every slight movement or small susurration. The pulse points on a lover’s body. The rate of their breath before leaning in for a kiss. Beneath the flies and the stars, you imagine beholding this world with such eyes: the howling wind would be visible, plainly, the sky would split into a thousand fractals, symmetrical as heaven. You laugh at the bigness of this all. The thought that there is a spectrum beyond a human spectrum comforts you. The buzz becomes a kind of tawdry music. You open a beer. You laugh and laugh and then there are flies.