My Tears

My tears do not arrive loudly.

They do not knock.

They slip in quietly,

like uninvited memories

that know exactly where I keep my weakest hours.

They gather behind my eyes,

not as water at first,

but as pressure—

as stories with no place to sit,

as sentences too heavy

for the mouth to hold.

I blink,

and suddenly the world blurs,

as if reality itself

has decided to soften its edges

out of respect.

My tears are not always sad.

That is the first lie people believe.

Sometimes they come from relief—

the kind that follows survival,

when you realize

you made it through something

that almost unmade you.

Sometimes they rise from anger,

hot and sharp,

burning as they fall,

as if they resent gravity

for pulling them down

instead of letting them scream upward.

And sometimes,

they come from nowhere at all—

or so it seems.

But nowhere is never empty.

Nowhere is full of everything

you refused to feel earlier.

My tears remember what I forget.

They remember the conversations

I rehearsed but never had,

the apologies I swallowed,

the goodbyes I pretended weren’t final.

They remember the version of me

that believed effort guaranteed outcomes,

that love was always returned,

that patience was always rewarded.

When my tears fall,

they are not weak—

they are accurate.

Each one carries a small truth.

One tear says,

“I was trying.”

Another says,

“I was tired.”

Another whispers,

“I needed someone to notice.”

They slide down my face

like quiet witnesses,

leaving no fingerprints,

only evidence.

I have cried in bathrooms,

locked rooms,

late nights where even the clock

felt too loud.

I have cried into pillows,

into hands,

into silence so thick

it felt like drowning on land.

And in those moments,

my tears were the only things

that stayed honest with me.

They did not tell me

to be strong.

They did not rush me toward healing.

They did not say

“everything happens for a reason.”

They simply fell,

patient,

faithful,

doing the one thing

they knew how to do—

release.

My tears know my name

better than most people.

They know the exact second

when pretending becomes impossible.

They arrive when my shoulders drop,

when my breath changes shape,

when the body admits

what the mind kept denying.

There are tears I wipe away quickly,

ashamed of their presence,

as if vulnerability were a mess

I failed to clean up in time.

And there are tears

I let fall freely,

watching them drip onto floors,

sleeves,

letters I never sent.

Those are the brave ones.

My tears are teachers.

They teach me where I am tender.

They point to wounds

still asking for care.

They reveal the distance

between who I am

and who I pretend to be.

When I listen closely,

they say things like:

“You’ve been holding too much.”

“You don’t have to earn rest.”

“This hurt mattered.”

They ask nothing in return

except permission.

I have learned that my tears

are not the opposite of strength.

They are proof of endurance.

You do not cry

unless you have first survived.

No one sees the long nights

that come before the tears,

the hours of standing upright

while something inside collapses quietly.

The tears arrive last—

as punctuation.

Sometimes my tears fall for people

who will never know.

For versions of myself

that didn’t make it this far.

For futures that closed their doors

without explanation.

Those tears are soft,

almost gentle,

as if grief itself

has learned to be kind.

Other times,

my tears come fast and sudden,

a storm with no warning,

breaking open the sky of my face

in public places,

at the worst possible moments.

Those tears are inconvenient.

They are messy.

They do not care about timing.

They care about truth.

I have tried to stop my tears before—

held my breath,

bit my lip,

looked up,

changed the subject inside my head.

But tears are stubborn.

They believe in honesty

more than politeness.

They will wait,

but they will not disappear.

Over time,

I have learned to sit with them.

To let them fall without judgment.

To understand that every tear

is the body saying,

“I am processing.”

And that is not failure.

That is work.

When the tears end—

and they always do—

there is a strange quiet afterward.

Not happiness.

Not resolution.

Just space.

A clearing.

In that space,

I feel lighter,

not because the pain vanished,

but because it was acknowledged.

My tears do not fix me.

They do not erase the past.

They do not promise tomorrow.

But they keep me human.

They remind me

that I am alive enough to feel,

brave enough to break open,

and honest enough

to let something fall

instead of holding it forever.

So when my tears come now,

I no longer ask them to leave.

I make room.

Because if my tears are speaking,

it means my heart

is still telling the truth.

And that—

even on the hardest days—

is something worth listening to.