He was not afraid to cry.
Despite years of torture from friends in grade school, the bantering and words thrown at him from his brothers, and the shame he saw in his own face as the tears fell down from his eyes, he was never afraid to cry.
From a young age, his mother had taught him that allowing himself a moment to let the salt-filled tears slide down his face was normal and healthy. When he came home from school, emotions overwhelming his first failure (in his mind), she held him in her arms and gently cooed words of love and acceptance.
Years went on, and the boy learned to put on a stone cold face. He wouldn’t allow himself to cry. In those high school years of confusion and misunderstanding, he didn’t give in. He wouldn’t cry; tears stained his face too many times in his youth.
He didn’t realize at the time, he was still in his youth.
His mother asked him one morning, as she was brewing coffee, why he didn’t allow himself to feel.
“I am feeling, mother,” he told her softly, “But the tears won’t come.”
His mother looked into his blue eyes, the eyes that reflected her own, and poured herself a black cup of joe.
“When you know love, when you discover the ache of longing and the pure rapture of being one with a person,” she said, “you’ll remember the feeling of when you were young.”
He took these words with him as he left his home.
Time went on, years went by, and he found himself here. With her.
And he wasn’t afraid to cry.
The sun began to set, the band began to play, and as she sang along and held onto his hand, he lied back in the grass. He couldn’t stop time from taking her away, and he couldn’t stop this ever fleeting moment from slipping through his hands.
The words of his mother found him at this moment, and he cried. Tears of joy, tears of sorrow, tears of love and happiness.
It was in this moment that he discovered his heart.