At witchcraft trials, a double dilemma: women who did not cry had their dry eyes taken as evidence of inhumanity, as proof that they were the devil’s creatures, while women who cried were accused of feigning tears for sympathy, were the devil’s creatures still. In either case, women were not overtaken by their tears, inhabited by the Holy Spirit, but failed to produce them or produced them falsely, and women who were not overtaken were witches.

I gathered, as I grew up, anecdotes of hiding my emotions. I cried in the bathroom, at a party, about a week before my mother died and pretended, later, that I’d had a nice time. At the funeral, I met the eyes of three friends, sitting in a row, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to smile, politely, as I would if we met in the hallway at school. I spent the subsequent year laughing, falling into fits of laughter that often had me banished from the classroom to sit alone; a friend told me, later, that she liked it when the door opened and my giggles, continuing, filtered back inside. She liked it, I think, because I appeared so capable of making myself happy. It seems eerie, though, to me: I was a girl afraid to cry.

I learnt, somehow, to read misery as failure, to see the discomfort of others as a sign that I was doing something wrong. I felt guilty when I cried in front of my piano teacher, who asked me, soon after her death, why my mother didn’t help me practice. I felt embarrassed when teachers told the class that they were leaving and I cried, or when we were assigned texts about grief, summoning spirals of despair. I hoped that nobody saw the slips of paper in my pigeon hole, suggesting that I visit the school counsellor. I was supposed to be happy, I thought.

I felt, when I called to confess I’d been going to therapy and had been prescribed antidepressants by a doctor, as if I were a bad daughter, as if the depression, or at least the confession of it, was a betrayal of my father, something that would hurt him. The failed mystic, E. M. Cioran writes, ‘is the one who can’t cast off all temporal ties’. I was an adult, by then, but still a motherless girl.

In the sixteenth century, tears were once again acceptable, seen as offerings to a lover rather than to a God.

(‘What is the difference?’ I want to ask.)

Centuries earlier, Virgil, Propertius and other Latin poets had written of tears as a tactic of seduction, glistening on the cheek, drawing the lover closer. ‘Let her dry mouth drink your tears’, wrote Ovid, and tears were an aphrodisiac, as they had been fourteen centuries earlier, when they first appeared on a stone tablet that advised readers to drink them like wine.

In the seventeenth century, some believed that love heated the heart, which cooled itself through water vapour. This vapour rose to the head and condensed around the eyes, slipping out in the form of tears.

Later still, Stendhal believed that only involuntary tears could tell a lover that they were loved. This inability to restrain tears remains, to many, a sign of love.

(‘Or of PTSD’, I want to add.)

It is true, often, that fountains are beautiful, that lovers sit on their edges and smile, that children run toward them, through them, laughing. It is true that fountains are intended to offer pleasure.

Hannah cried on our first date, when I mentioned that my mother was dead. ‘I’m sorry’, I said, though I’d promised myself, in the past, that I would stop apologising for my childhood trauma. She cried again, a month later, reading an essay that I had written. ‘You must know that this is good’, she said, looking up. I can’t remember what I said, in response, but I was happy, then, believing that her tears meant something, that my words had cast a spell.

I read that tears are the site where angels bathe, that they are composed of liquid pearl.

I want this essay to have the texture of cathartic weeping and yet instead of a mourner, a mystic overtaken, I find myself a scientist, looking at my subject from outside, as if through a plane of glass. I spend too much time on research, compile a history of crying in place of my own feelings. I try to pull myself back to my own experiences, but I feel myself resisting, afraid to come undone. I haven’t cried in weeks; ‘inconvenient timing’, I joke.

But it can’t be a coincidence, can it? It’s a sign that I can’t control my emotions, that even when I try to harness my tears they remain wild, mysterious, beyond my grasp.

I think, sometimes, that there must be something narcissistic in life writing, and yet I am more like Echo, crying out for another, losing myself in the wilderness, becoming less and less with each new draft, cutting myself down as I seek, still, an impossible perfection. I want the emotions without the excretions, but tears sparkle and embarrass me simultaneously. I am closest to a saint when I am absent, defined only by my object of desire.

I want the decadence of cathartic weeping, and yet I still tend toward the spare.

I confessed that I was falling in love only because I couldn’t stop crying, because I felt I owed Hannah an explanation for my sudden premonitions of loss. I felt too vulnerable, wanted to keep it to myself. ‘I’m falling in love with you’, I said, through the tears. ‘It frightens me’. She seemed happy for a minute, perhaps two. ‘You’re such a mess’, she said. ‘It’s so cute’. She pulled away, then, though, and said that she was overwhelmed, afraid of intimacy. She suggested, the next morning, that we spend less time together, sent me a PDF on boundaries.

Falling, like a tear from a chalice.

But, of course, nobody owes anybody love.

In the nineteenth century, tear catchers, small bottles for storing tears, were popular. ‘Put thy tears unto thou bottle’, said mourners, quoting the Bible’s Old Testament. The vessels, now found in some museums, were a means of measuring the duration of grief; when the tears in the bottle had evaporated, the mourning period was complete.

It never worked, though: scientists, recently, performed chemical tests on these flasks and found no record of tears within them, no surfaces eroded through exposure to human salts. Tears evaporate, ascend toward the heavens, too quickly for containment. It is a fantasy to hold and measure the ineffable.