Taxonomy of Tears

I have been keeping a catalog. Not on paper, you understand, but in the soft tissue behind my sternum where my memory lives closest to the bone. A taxonomy of all the ways water can leave the body when the body has run out of words. And before you read and wonder to yourself like everyone else why I'm always writing melancholy, I can't help it. I ket it out and hold on to the shambles that look like happiness. So let me acquaint you with the labels I have made up.The Ones That Taste Like Copper

These arrive without a warning. You could be washing dishes or folding laundry or standing in line for food, and suddenly your throat closes around a fist that wasn't there a moment ago. These tears taste like the past tense of love, like all the ways you were supposed to say goodbye but didn't, like the specific weight of a door closing in a house you'll never enter again. This once happened to me in a biochemistry class and I pretended to shift my glasses in place but in reality I was just wiping my tears.

My grandmother once said these tears are made of unspoken apologies. The ones we owe ourselves, mostly. For staying too long. For leaving too soon. For believing that wanting something badly enough could make it true.

The Tahajjud Tears

Different entirely. These come at 3am when the world is holding its breath and you're the only one awake enough to hear Allah listening. These don't taste like anything earthly. They're distilled from something purer, something that exists in the lumen between total submission and supplication.

You cry them into your palms and you're not even sure what you're crying for anymore. For everything. For nothing. For the version of yourself you were before life taught you that softness is a language most people have forgotten how to speak. These tears are archaeology. They excavate you, layer by layer, until you're standing in front of the Divine with no armor, no pretense, just the raw fact of your existence asking to be held.

The Swallowed Ones

These are an art form. A discipline. These are the tears that reside permanently in your throat, that set up residence in the hollow of your clavicle, that you've trained yourself to breathe around like they're permanent fixtures in the architecture of your body.

You swallow them at dinner tables when someone asks if you're okay and you say fine like it's not a lie. You swallow them on phone calls with your mother when she tells you she's proud and you know you're performing a version of yourself she can love without worrying. You swallow them in bathrooms at weddings, in the back seats of taxis, in the quiet moments between waking and rising when you're still deciding which face to wear for the day.

These are the ones that calcify. That turn into stones you carry in your pockets, weighing you down in ways no one can see.

The Ones for People Who Are Still Breathing

The most complicated kind. Grieving someone who hasn't died but has simply decided to exist in a life that no longer includes you. These tears are made of paradox: how do you mourn someone you can still see on screens, whose laughter you can still hear in crowded rooms, who is alive and well and simply not yours, was never yours, will never be yours?

These arrive in waves. When their name appears somewhere unexpected. When you hear a line you can’t read anymore without remembering. When you catch yourself reaching for your phone to tell them something before you remember: you don't do that anymore. That door closed. That language is dead.

The Relief Tears

Rare. Precious. These come after. After the waiting. After the holding on. After the final permission to let go. They taste like rain after drought, like the first deep breath after holding yourself underwater for too long.

These are the tears that say: it's over. It's finally, mercifully, completely over. You survived. You're still here. The thing you thought would destroy you merely transformed you, and you're standing in the aftermath realizing you're stronger in the broken places, more luminous in the scars.

The Inherited Ones

These belonged to my mother first, and her mother before her. These are the tears of women who learned to cry quietly, who understood that too much emotion makes you a burden, that the world doesn't have patience for feelings that take up space.

I carry them in my DNA. The ones my grandmother cried into pillows so her children wouldn't hear. The ones my mother swallowed so she could keep smiling. The accumulated grief of generations of women who were told that strength looks like silence, that love looks like sacrifice, that devotion looks like disappearing.

The Ones I Don't Understand Yet

Sometimes I cry and I don't know why. Not because of anything specific, but because of everything cumulative. Because the weight of being alive is heavier some days. Because tenderness hurts. Because beauty breaks you open just as surely as tragedy does.

These tears are prophetic, I think. They're crying for something that hasn't happened yet, or something that happened so long ago I've forgotten to remember it. They're the body's way of saying: there is grief here that hasn't been named, pain that hasn't been given language, loss that is still learning how to be articulated.

The Ones That Come in Crowds

On the prayer mat, in the shower, driving home from somewhere that used to mean something. These are democratic. They don't care about your timing, your plans, your carefully maintained composure. They arrive in floods, in armies, in delegations sent from every locked room in your chest demanding to be witnessed.

You can't stop these. You can only survive them. Ride them out like storms, like fevers, like possessions that need to run their course before they release you back to yourself.

The Ones for Beauty

Yes, these exist too. The tears that come when something is so exquisite you can barely stand it. An Aayah of the Quran that exquisitely reaches inside your heart and rearranges your atoms. A sunset that looks like all the beautiful hues you could ever see in a lifetime. A child's laughter that reminds you what innocence sounded like before you became this thing that you are now.

These tears say: the world is unbearably beautiful and I am unbearably alive and sometimes those two facts colliding is more than my heart knows how to hold without spilling over.

The Catalog Continues

I'm still working on my classifications. Still discovering new species of grief, new subspecies of joy, new hybrid tears that are both gratitude and sorrow, both hello and goodbye, both breaking and mending.

My body is a laboratory. Each tear a specimen. Each cry a experiment in what the heart can hold before it has to release, what the soul can carry before it has to surrender, what it means to be human in a world that keeps asking you to be more than that, less than that, anything but exactly that.

To me, that's the point. I have titled them but the taxonomy doesn't really matter. I realize tears are just the soul's way of speaking when words have proven themselves insufficient. And every tear is a prayer in a language older than language. And crying is just another way of saying: I am here, I am alive, I am still capable of feeling, and isn't that terrifying, and isn't that miraculous, and isn't that enough?

The catalog remains open.

New entries arrive daily.

I keep recording them, keep naming them, keep trying to understand what my body knows that my mind is still learning:

That tears are not weakness.

They are translation.

They are the water that makes gardens possible in the desert of trying to be strong all the time.

And some days, that's the only thing that saves me.