The Messy Middle
There is a place
where jokes are told too late,
or too soon—
where someone laughs mid-sob
and apologizes for it,
as if joy were an intrusion
instead of a reflex.
It’s the room where caring is unavoidable.
You trip over it.
It spills out of you
in the form of nicknames,
burnt coffee made just the way they like it,
the silence you sit in
without trying to fix.
Here, heartbreak wears a grin—
crooked, defensive.
It says, I’m fine,
then asks if you remember that one story
(the dumb one, the good one)
because remembering hurts less
than pretending it didn’t matter.
Goodbyes in this place are never clean.
They linger in doorways,
turn back once more,
leave pieces behind like forgotten coats
or jokes no one else will tell right.
You laugh because if you don’t,
the weight of loving this much
might buckle your knees.
You ache because humor
is just another way of holding on.
And when you finally walk away,
you carry both—
the punchline and the bruise,
proof that you were here,
that you cared,
that the mess was worth it.
