A Rumination on Crying

I am crying and he is watching me.
"It bothers me the way you just let tears run all down your face, down your neck, into your shirt and your hair..." He says finally. Without looking at him I wipe some of the tears away with my hand. I smile.
"It bothers you?"
He looks at me sideways.
"It makes me itch." he says. I laugh at this and wipe away the rest of my tears. He has a way of ruining pivotal or emotional movie moments with random comments like this. He has never, however, commented specifically on the way I cry and I wonder for the first time what other observations he has made about me, but has yet to comment on. I do not bother to explain why I seldom thwart the flow of tears when I cry, not just because doing so would interrupt the remainder of this movie we are watching, but more so because I don't think he truly cares to know. When our relationship was newer, if ever he caught me crying he would look into my face intently and say in mock surprise, "Bud- you're leaking!" I find that if ever I am moved to tears I do, in fact, "leak" profusely and this is something that not only do I not mind, but that I've come to appreciate...even enjoy in a way. I've come to embrace intense emotion on the whole. It is so uniquely human to feel something deeply. How curious it is that extreme sadness, pain and happiness can all induce the same response- tears. In high school I wrote an expose on tears and why they are clear, in which I pose the hypothesis that tears are clear so that we can see through them to move on. This idea has no bearing on my current pondering about why I do not wipe away my tears. I think I don't wipe them away because doing so would render the emotional response incomplete and therefore unfulfilling. I believe weeping should be therapeutic, if not comforting, or the act becomes wholly arbitrary and a messy waste of water. I feel that tears should always be warranted, never random. They should result from some inner passion that can be released no other way; a feeling that bubbles up and overflows in the form of tears. That feeling, however painful, is also an exhilarating reminder of humanity, of the powerful presence, burden and privilege of a soul. I do not brush away my tears because I believe them to be more than just an outward expression of simply feeling. They are an expulsion of some sentiment which cannot otherwise be contained. It is like being bathed in warmth, swathed in a tangible form of extreme emotion, then relieved of it slowly as it flows down and away. The beauty of it all is that tears are as infinite as the soul, endless as the feelings they embody. Crying is something so rarely embraced and so often stifled its significance goes greatly underestimated, but it is something beautiful, something simply extraordinary, when the windows of the soul spring a leak.