We called it giggle juice. It’s what makes you spit out your drink or run from the table for fear of choking. It’s what makes you swallow ocean water in large, precarious gulps because there’s tears spraying down your cheeks and you can’t tell what tastes saltier. It’s what made our love worth holding onto. We laughed the whole time. It’s almost like that’s all we ever did.
My brother tells me my laugh sounds more and more like our mother’s every time we meet, which isn’t often, our relationship punctuated by the necessary acquaintances: happy birthday texts, holiday visits, voicemails left and calls not returned. Dylan jumps back when I cackle, and I cover my mouth when I realize my laugh has swallowed up the whole room. Brandon tells me you can hear my laugh all the way down the block, and at first I can’t help but blush and try to make myself quieter, smaller, trying to silence something unruly inside of me that’s tugging at the seams, desperate to escape.
But giggle juice is what envelopes me when the tension that holds my shoulders captive finally releases, when the distractions that beckon me this way and that finally abate to silence, and I’m here. I can’t help but let the cackles and giggles tumble out of me in great big chokes and sounds I should be embarrassed by but am learning not to be. It’s what breaks through the heaviness of each sluggish day, the loud criticism rattling in my brain, the dark cloud that I’ll refer to only by sadness’ cousin and never by name.
To laugh with someone is more intimate than almost anything at all, better than the twisted sheets, sweat-stained and crinkled from the night shared. It’s somehow softer than the quiet moments shared between two lovers when silence is finally welcome, not feared. For us, laughter was sticky and kept us near, despite the tears and the arguments and the insecurities we tried to hide from each other but never could. Sometimes they’d start with a soft smile, a concession to break the ice. They punctuate silence and offer an olive branch. In the giggles and turn of your mouth and cackles that can be deafening and sometimes absolutely silent, they say: I love you, and I’m sorry.
My parents taught me that. If there was anything louder than the front door slamming behind my mother and my dads booming voice, more fear than anything else, it was the laughter that would inevitably follow. In the hospital visits and panic attacks and nights I hid in my childhood bathroom because conflict made me, still makes me, terrified, -- laughter would be next. When it came, it flooded. It burst through the bricks laying on my chest and it unlocked door knobs and then it said: I love you, and I’m sorry.
I love this!
My biggest fear is spitting out my drink onto someone’s face when I laugh and I’m confident it’ll happen to me in the next 18 months. When that happens I will say “No fucking way this is so crazy because I recently commented on my friend Becky’s Substack saying that I was afraid of this very thing happening; let me show you the comment”. Then I’ll show them this comment.