If They Could Talk...

I wrote this short some time back from a writing prompt. Let me know what you think, or share a moment of when your tears helped you out.

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Life teaches us lessons throughout our journey from infancy to adulthood, and some lessons stick with us forever.

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I told you I don’t like you coming around in front of people. It’s embarrassing and you have no right to go against my wishes. We’ve fought about this issue many times and if you must continue at least wait until I get home. In my life, I’ve asked for few things, but this is one I demand.

My dear, there’s no harm in crying they show you’re human, but I already knew that. It’s the rest of the world you close off to pretending to be something you’re really not. You have a strong façade, but a soft heart that melts your core.

Shout at the top of your lungs, let your emotions show through smeared mascara, a red nose and blotched skin. It’s a part of getting to the end, so stumbling and crying over losses and wants helps you recover and carry on.

At birth, your bellow rattled the instruments in the ER causing the nurses to smirk at your entrance. You might have been small, but your lungs and face weren’t strangers to crying when wanting your way. As an infant, you spent majority of the time calling upon us with a scrunched reddened face insisting on being fed, changed or just to let everyone know you were tired.

When you were seven years old, you fractured your foot and cried from the pain. They knew something happened because of your reaction. If we weren’t there for you, your family might have ignored it thinking it was just a sprain. We helped get their attention for a cast with well wishes from friends and family to cover your leg.

Then in high school, the solitude started and you hid your feelings in the darkness of your room. Only a week after your sweet sixteen did you ask us to help you out when you almost experienced rape. Your friends crowded around listening to what happened the night before when you got away from a guy who took advantage of your drunken state. With our presence, your friends felt your pain and fear, which ultimately helped them in the future. They thought about that night when they came across a similar situation where their own actions were questioned.

What stopped you completely was the loss of your friend. We flowed and flowed and wouldn’t stop until we made your eyes swell into slits. You cried daily and everywhere until we left you alone. At that point, you became hollow dismissing us with pain and happiness. And when we did decide to come around you sought shelter to avoid being seen.

For years you fought us and demanded our secrecy, but as time does with everything else, it helped you overcome the mindset of ‘crying is a sign of weakness.’ You started inviting us for joyous moments, along with heartbreak until you listened to us and learned that we needed one another.

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This is what my tears told me, and I’ve listened to them ever since.