The Laugh
There are moments our inescapable humanness is so darling and devastating all at once that I burst into a special kind of laughter. It’s my biggest, most expansive laugh.
“I’ve never heard you laugh like that.”
It’s the way I laughed when I pointed out to a friend that the shadow of a campsite grill against the side of a tent looked like a floating drive-by diner on a pole, and we silently, then very not-so-silently, considered the absurdity of a future where there were both floating cars and diners propped up on popsicle sticks.
It’s the way I laughed when, shading my face from the sun with a pink sequined hat, I exclaimed with joy at the surprising rainbow bokeh effects and handed it to a friend laying beside me, and she, giving it her all to see what I saw, said it just felt like she had a hat on her face.
It’s the way I laughed supine on the couch in a warm Beacon living room in winter, discussing the “Celebration Cake Industrial Complex” and office birthday celebrations, the ones HR puts on in the kitchen for everyone with a November birthday; where you ask the coworkers of honor, as you wait to bring a small slice of cake back to your desk to eat:
“So…when’s your actual birthday?”
It’s a laugh that doesn’t feel like it comes out of me but through me, originating from some curious cosmic source that sees the human race in its spatial and temporal entirety and then some.
It watches us stumble on stage as the curtain rises on the Anthropocene, our time to shine, not knowing our lines or even our parts and improvising the best we can. The show must go on.
It watches astrophysicists push hard on doors that say pull.
It watches with compassion.
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Read more on the All Hearts On Deck blog.
