Emerge From the Mist

{This is my PROMPTuesday post.}

Gut laughs come rarely these days. Those hold-your-stomach, ache-y-in-a-good-way, from-the-soul laughs that used to be so common when we both had perms and ate candy corn for breakfast.

You made me laugh in that rollicking, raw way. Day after day, minute to minute, we riffed on each other’s fledgling jokes and took them to dizzying heights. It felt like we boarded a rocket together, blasted off and shot straight to the big sky, snickering the whole way because we got away with it.

Those times built me up, sustained me, enlarged my heart. Twenty-five years later, a wacky grin steals across my face when I remember the poem you wrote about fish, or it might have been about flies, and how both were like friendship. It read crazy, but you made it work. I found your words again a few months ago, penned in your precise Mondrian script, and they were as brilliant and ridiculous as always.

How about that time we wore bras over our t-shirts because we were too lazy to put them on the right way?

Or when you’d squirrel away in your bedroom closet with your guitar and write something amazing?

I didn’t know you cried in that closet so much of the time.

I could have been there.

Made you laugh in the good-for-your-soul way we used to do. Or stayed silent while you sang your tears.

I would have done that too.