tears

What if tears were colored? What if they stained your face? The color would fade over a number of hours--a couple days unless they were minimal--until they were gone. I wonder if we would start to decipher how many hours ago someone cried or how much they suffered.

Sad tears would be blue. Dark blue, and the more you cried, the darker they'd get. If you had been crying heavily, for hours, and uncontrollably, they'd turn purple. I wonder how this would change our lives, if people would learn to cry less and only do so in extreme circumstances. As criers, would we become cold, and numb to the world around us? Or would we be more sympathetic as we'd see how much others weep, how the tears that stained our faces last night also stained another's?
I think I know my answer but it may apply to me differently. I'll let you think about it on your own.

On the other hand, happy tears would be pink; not a hot pink or particularly light, just a fair pink. They would disappear much faster, only lasting a little over a day at most. They'd have that long so one could look in the mirror and remember that 24 hours ago they were so happy that they marked themselves with a pink glow. Happy tears come about so much less often than sad ones and it would be a flaw of the universe that they should be hidden by a faster fading, but that's the way it would be.
Maybe people would like to see the pink on a loved one's face and go out of their way to make something so spectacular for them that they might cry. I really don't think that would happen too often because once we got used to happy tears, we would slowly become prone to them, less affected by overwhelming joy. Pink tears would be sacred and saved for the most natural provocations.

There are other types of crying besides happy and sad, I know, but tears derived from frustration or because the mind and body are overwhelmed wouldn't have their own colors. It wouldn't work that way; the body could only decipher the most vague feelings to categorize one's emotions. Baby's tears would still be clear. Their cries are purely need-based. They don't cry because they are sad, but because they're physically uncomfortable with hunger, noise, or the need to be changed. Once the mind starts understanding emotions, the tears would change. It would be an interesting reinforcement of the idea of child innocence and purity. A child wouldn't be ashamed of their tears to try to hide them. They would sympathize with their peers and probably have the strongest of human relationships.


Think about it. Our faces are what we show most to the world. They are what we search for in a mirror, what we employ to tell someone that we approve or are disgruntled. When we're not happy with the way our face looks, or can't cover it up with enough make up, we change clothing to make us appear more outstanding or to blend in with a crowd and be indiscernible. To have our woes stamped onto that which we depend on to represent our minds and to be incapable of hiding them while staying true to ourselves would be close to revolutionary. We could no longer easily hide our sadness in the night, knowing that sleep would erase the evidence of puffy eyes and a cracked voice. Would we hide from each other or embrace strangers, hold more tightly onto those we love?