One day about five years ago when I was helping my mom to clean up the attic, I found a shoebox full of love-letters. They were love-letters my dad once sent to my mom. I was lucky because my mom had just left the attic to pick up the phone. So I had time to read one of them. I knew I wasn't supposed to, but as a sixteen year old girl, a dreamer as I was back then and as I actually still am, I didn't care. I was curious about the letters.

Even though I heard my mom talking on the phone in a safe distance, my heartbeat was tremendous and my hands were shaking when I unfolded the frist letter.

Dear Monica,

Days here in the military service are so long and I'm always thinking of you...

It went on and on and I was taken aback by those words my dad once wrote to my mom. I didn't know that he could write anything like that. There was so much feeling in it, so much poetry. At the end of the letter there was one sentence I'll never forget.

Ps: If you were a tear, I would never cry because of fear to lose you!

I just had enough time to put the letter back into the shoebox before my mom came back. She didn't notice anything because I kept the shoebox behind me and in a moment she didn't pay attention I put it back in the corner where I had found it. But that last sentence my dad had written was trapped in my mind all day long. I just loved it. 'If you were a tear...' I wished somebody would compare me with a tear. I started to think about it and I asked myself: What is a tear? If you asked a scientist he would probably say:

Tears are the salty fluid that lubricates and helps protect the cornea, the membrane that covers the front of the eye. Tears flow into the eye through ducts from tiny glands located under the upper eyelids and are spread over the eye each time a person blinks, which is about every six seconds. Tears keep the eye moist and free of dust and other eye irritants.

Hmm. Sounds interesting, intelligent. But for me a tear is more than that, more than just a fluid that keeps your eye moist. A tear is love. Pure love. Have you ever thought about it? Everytime we cry, we cry because of love. We cry at a funeral because we have lost a loved one. We cry when we have to say goodbye because it hurts to see somebody leave you have learnt to love. Tears are also an expression of how you feel when somebody hurt you. Why? Because you love the person who hurt you, because you care about that person and you can't understand why he or she did this to you. Or think of times when you were so happy that you couldn't stop the tears of running down your cheek. Tears of love. A tear doesn't mean pain or sorrow, it actually means love.

If you were a tear, I would never cry because of fear to lose you!

Don't you wanna be compared to a tear?