• 27 Dec, 2025 *

There once was a people who have mostly been forgotten by the erasure of numbers and facts, but shimmers in the eyes of a few sensitive souls, dormant in hard bodies.

Homo lacrimans: the weeping human. Humans who, from the moment they were born to the last breath they took, were shedding tears. From what you may ask and I must reply... everything. The required suffering that is thrust upon any being on this planet: frustration of boredom, pain of cuts and bruises and heartache, fear of the unknown, the beauty of sunlight on first snow, the anger of failure, the excitement of ripened fruit, shame of selfishness, guilt of causing others to cry, joy of being hugged by loved ones, love of what is seen and unseen.

Full of feeling with only a small tear for the tipping spill to relieve the bursting seams, Homo lacrimans walked on this earth with puddles for eyes, seeing the world with lenses different from ours, able to pay attention to the often overlooked and undermind. As a result, they would dance and paint to convey messages, speak in sensations and abstract inner stirrings to describe the physical world around them. Although there is no written historical evidence of their exact language, a phrase that has been passed down by word (very much to the approval of the Homo lacrimans I must imagine)translated over and over again throughout various people gives us a rough sense of what these people may have said: "A small hum fluttered my beating ache upon seeing her resting on a soft and colorful scent of summer that was greatly missed."

There were many reasons, hard to say which definitively, for why these humans went extinct. The most common theory is that they did not survive the many wars between the different human species, killed by their more calculating and gossiping cousins with eyes fixed forward, always facing. Their tears blinded them to the simplest dangers, leaving them without a sense of place amid chaos. Those not killed outright were caught between the trunks of dead trees, forced to speak and speak in their enigmatic language until their dying breath.

However, despite being extinct in the eyes of science, lacking in bone and muscle and nerves, they live on in the mouths of storytellers with tales that haunt passing ears, never to be remembered by the impatient and demanding.

Those whose eyes water at the smallest of stirrings in their heart.