🖋️ Scientifically Speaking:
Tears are a liquid produced by your eyes—specifically by the lacrimal glands—to keep them healthy, clean, and protected. But they’re more than just “eye water”—they actually serve several important roles.
👁️ What tears do
- Lubricate your eyes so they don’t dry out
- Protect against dust, debris, and bacteria
- Help you see clearly by keeping the surface of your eye smooth
💧 What tears are made of
Tears aren’t just water—they’re a mix of:
- Water
- Oils (to keep them from evaporating too quickly)
- Mucus (to help spread them evenly)
- Proteins and enzymes (like antibacterial agents)
😢 The 3 types of tears
- Basal tears – Always present, keeping your eyes moist
- Reflex tears – Produced when something irritates your eyes (like smoke, onions, or wind)
- Emotional tears – Triggered by feelings like sadness, joy, stress, or relief
🧠 Why we cry emotionally
Emotional tears are unique to humans. They’re linked to your brain and nervous system and may:
- Help release stress hormones
- Signal emotions to others (a form of communication)
- Provide a sense of relief after crying
So tears aren’t just about sadness—they’re part of how your body maintains eye health and processes emotion at the same time.
✍🏽 Poetically Speaking
Tears are the quiet language of the body-
words the heart could not hold anymore…
the moment your heart can no longer pretend it’s okay.
They don’t ask for permission.
They rise, uninvited,
from the deepest parts of you—
from the places you hide your pain,
your love, your longing,
your everything.
Some fall for the smallest reasons—
a grain of dust, a sharp wind—
Others come heavier,
pulled from deeper places.
Each tear carries something you couldn’t hold onto—
a word you never said,
a touch you still remember,
a goodbye that never felt finished.
Sometimes they burn as they fall,
not because they hurt your skin,
but because they’ve traveled through everything that does.
And still… they come.
Soft, steady, unstoppable—
like your soul trying to breathe
after holding itself together for far too long.
A tear is such a fragile thing—
just a trembling, crystalline drop—
yet it holds the weight of entire moments,
entire memories, entire stories.
It’s release.
It’s truth.
It’s the quiet proof
that you felt something so deeply
it refused to stay inside you.
So when the tears fall,
let them.
Because they are not weakness—
they are everything in you
that chose to feel…
instead of turning cold.
😡Realistically:
That’s all well and good but why so many damn tears! Why won’t they stop? I need them to stop! I want them to stop! This constant flood, this drowning in everything I feel. I am so tired of feeling things so deeply that even breathing feels like an open wound. I am tired of crying, I am tired of the tears that come without warning, without mercy. Tired of this ache that blooms within my chest, as I fight- again and again- to keep myself from completely falling apart.
I welcome the cold, I beg for numbness- for silence inside my own mind, for stillness that doesn’t echo with everything I’ve lost, everything I can’t fix, everything that won’t let me go. I crave the kind of quiet where nothing reaches me anymore, where my heart finally stops aching, where I don’t have to feel every crack, every fracture, every fissure cracking wider. Of a soul so broken that nothing hurts me anymore.
But somewhere, beneath all of this- beneath the exhaustion, the grief, the desperate need to feel nothing at all- there is still somewhere in me that refuses to disappear. Because even now, through all the pain, through every tear I wish would dry…
I am still here.
Still breathing.
Still feeling…
…even when it hurts this fucking much.
-Bella Imperia
Bella Imperia: The Things I Don't Say 
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