Your favorite joke is when you’ve said something stupid.
Something a little silly, something you let slip in front of a couple friends. You’re acting a bit strange because you’re comfortable. You’re acting a bit strange because you can.
Your favorite joke is when one of your friends teases, “What, you need therapy or something?”
Your other friends laugh, but it catches you off guard.
Because they don’t know, but you do.
You know they weren’t there to laugh when you were juggling sixteen things at once—when your hands were melting into puddles and you could only catch so many pieces of your life.
They weren’t there to laugh when you had to forfeit a relationship with your sibling to maintain good grades in school.
They weren’t there to laugh when you stood in the mirror and, for the first time, you didn’t like what you saw.
They weren’t there to laugh when you were up at 4am, thinking about if there was a god, questioning humanity’s significance, contemplating the meaning of existence.
They weren’t there to laugh when you decided there was none.
They weren’t there to laugh during your third session of therapy, when nothing in your psyche had changed and you figured you were uncurable.
They weren’t there to laugh when you felt so, truly alone for the first time even among the presence of others—when you were suffocating beneath the pressure of commitment so fatally that you saw no other choice but to cut yourself off from everyone you loved.
They weren’t there to laugh when the only person who you hadn’t left decided to leave you.
They weren’t there to laugh when you ended up cutting yourself by accident, only a little.
They weren’t there to laugh when the cuts stopped being accidents.
They weren’t there to laugh when your insides were spilling onto the floor, your emotions worn and your eyes torn, dripping out tears even though you felt nothing.
But you know that they don’t know. You know they wouldn’t have laughed, if they knew, too. And it’s good for them, you think, that they don’t know.
But before you can envy their ignorance, their joke—your favorite joke—rings in your ears again. “What, you need therapy or something?”
And you loosen your shoulders, release a little laugh, and joke back, “Yeah, maybe I do.”
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