Let them stain
Often, as each heave falls and the next rises, with each sob and stuttered inhales, every tear that grows full enough to embark the decent and reaches its weakened end upon the check.
When we can feel it’s salty weight heavy enough on our face, each and every one of us will reach up our forearm, hand or more likely our sleeve, and we will sweep up any obvious marks of that tears journey.
Do we feel impelled to dab away only because we find the sensation of our tears upon our cheeks unpleasant?
When you consider all the other sensations that comprise together the act of crying, tears really don’t match the heaving, sobbing and spluttered breath do they?
No.
We dab & wipe not because they FEEL unpleasant but because we are doing our best to mask the physical evidence of what we are feeling, the pain or hurt, sadness, the trauma.
We do that so often, try to hide the evidence of tears. We are putting sleeve to cheek with every fabricated “good” or “I’m well thanks” when some asks how we are.
We do it when we smile loudly while actually we silently swallow down that lump, masking a subtle cringe as we feel it travel down our throats.
We seem to have this aversion to leaving the tears to rest and settle upon our cheeks.
We soak up not only the remaining little ball of salty evidence that has escaped from our eyes and fled down our face, we grab at tissues, sleeves and the backs of our hands and we travel from where it’s journey ended, somewhere below our cheek bones horizon and we brush up.
All the way up to glide across our lower eyelid. Soak, dab, wipe and dry up the tear and any remaining evidence of its path downwards.
But what if, what if we didn’t? What if we just left them there, right there on our cheek, if we left them and their moistened travels right there on our cheek to just dry up.
What would happen if we let our tears dry up and leave their stain? Evident to those who cast gaze. What if we answered those “how are you’s with the salty honest truths, what would happen if we just returned with the dampened words, what if we just said we were not okay?
Once in a while when I cry, when I can’t stop the raining on my cheeks, sometimes I keep the backs of my hands dry, I do not moisten my sleeves. The tissues I leave sleeping in their box.
Once in a while I let my tears dry in their own time, I let the stain form. I study the marks they leave on my cheeks, each tainted line of pains pignmentations running across my blushed and tired skin.
Once in a while, I let my tears stain. And then I watch with growing strength, each time I let them stain, I watch with growing strength as those marks left behind from the salty saline upon my skin- eventually they fade away and leave me cleansed.
So I wonder, what would happen if we just let our tears to dry, if we just let them to stain.
What would happen if we just wore our struggles and replied we a cleansing salty simple “I am not okay”.