What brings a tear of joy to my eye? Christ, that’s the sort of question they ought to slap on the side of a whiskey bottle as a warning label. Because the answer never comes clean. It rips through your chest like a thunderclap at 3 A.M., the kind that rattles the windows and makes you swear the gods are stomping around on the roof.

It isn’t the paychecks or the hollow applause of strangers. It’s smaller, sharper things that sneak up on you when you’re half-mad from the grind. My son’s laugh, wild and unfiltered, bouncing through the trees when we’re out on some forgotten trail. My wife leaning into me at the Oregon coast, the sea spitting salt into our eyes while Haystack Rock squats on the horizon like a stone god daring us to blink first. Or the way the shutter clicks on my camera when I’ve nailed the impossible shot. Lightning frozen between the mountains, a single heartbeat snagged out of eternity and trapped forever in glass and pixels.

Those are the moments that hit hard enough to draw blood and water at the same time. The cruel miracle of being alive and knowing damn well it won’t last. That’s the tear, the drop of pure, feral joy that cuts through the chemical fog and reminds me that beneath all the chaos, all the snarling nonsense of this absurd human carnival, there are still fragments worth clinging to.

Not tidy, not holy, just raw and ungovernable. And if that doesn’t wring a tear out of you, maybe you’re already embalmed.