September Sixth

There was an expression I could never quite shake out of my head after I heard it. The same image still comes to my mind after a dozen years of considering this silly little figure of speech and when some friends came to the apartment, high on psychedelics, it seemed odd that I should again be reminded of a farm setting, the smell of manure and the sound of thick cream bubbling on hard dry hay.
There were two girls and they sobbed as they held each other on my living room floor. Everyone else was on the couch watching Speed Racer with the TV volume down and the stereo volume up wondering if they should keep pretending nothing odd was happening below them.
There's no use crying over spilled milk. I looked their distorted faces as one girl expressed how no body else understood, that she never was good enough to be a ballerina and no one will ever know what my pain was except for you Letica and Letica nods with pain and understanding in her eyes.
I turned back to the movie. The best thing about Speed Racer is that I can follow just the wildly colorful images and quick cutting while my thoughts take shape around things like Keats' opium trances or what the call of Cthulu actually sounds like or figures of speech that first struck me in childhood and have stayed with me since.
The first reaction I had to the idiom in question was why not? Why shouldn't I cry if I spill some milk on the ground? Remember Fox and the Hound when Todd makes the cow spill the bucket of milk over and the grandma got mad at him? I might have cried if I were Todd. But I suppose as I got a little older it became clear that not crying over spilled milk because we had gotten in trouble for it wasn't quite the issue. It makes sense to not worry over things that are past et cetera, et cetera, and even if I get a pastoral image in mind when I hear the phrase, thanks largely to the aforementioned movie, I get the sense of what that piece of speech is used for.
I look back at my friends. They were spilling over all over my floor about things gone and pasts unrealized, the milk, as it were, streaming down their faces and out of their noses. And as Emile Hirsch flew across the screen in the Mach 5 I realized that I've never really lost that sense of rebellion when it comes to crying over spilled milk. Why shouldn't I cry? There is something beautiful and real about the artist's life unrealized, the loss of something important, irretrievable, like milk seeping into dirty hay. My stomach coiled a little uncomfortably as I remember the embarrassment I had felt for my friends on the floor because there is nothing dishonorable in feeling the pain of loss and it is so much better when you can share the feeling with friends.