tell the poets i am not yet ready to join them and they will have to wait. there is laughter to be had.

Once upon a time there was a boy. and that boy did all sorts of things that he shouldn't have, all because his parents did not break the bad habits, did not heal their own wounds. he smoked and he drank and he fought and he had girls and he knew he was smarter than everyone around him but didn't know that his intelligence was limited by his parents' failure to model love and empathy.

the boy grew up and he had a hard time in school, in college, because no one likes an asshole who picks fights with professors. he got married, eventually, he thought he'd pulled it together. the boy in our story loved classical things, he loved poetry, and music, and art. but he only loved the "right types" of each, the works recognized for their accolades and for the number of people who knew of and praised them. the boy saw himself reflected in a film that became his favorite. the film starred an actor who understood pain and dedicated himself to laughter. (better to die later having lived providing light to others than bleed out alone without it.)

the boy had children. but he treated them just as though he regarded their value to be up for debate, to be determined in the future in the same way as the works he so loved. and he did not trust them, because of how he had once behaved, and so did not allow their autonomy or freedom to think, feel, or to be.

and one day, many years later, his eldest child watched the film that the man had always said he loved. and she left with the knowledge that the man who had raised her, who had once been the boy, was oblivious to that which she considered obvious: that the boy had seen himself in that film, but he did not not fill the same role as the man she knew now. because that boy, who had become a man, had seen himself as the main character, as the boy who escaped the thumb of a controlling and ignorant father the only way he could.

she left because to her, the man had only ever been the person to belittle and harass her, to throw insults and derision and to break her down with the slightest hint of self-confidence showing or even a taste of the adult she was going to be. he had been the person to make her dread existence, and the man that meant she did everything in her power to hold on just until she could escape. she vowed to herself to only use the same route as the character in the film if she could not see any other way out.

there were many times she came close. she even tried once or twice, but in the end, she didn't use it. instead, she grew up. and she became a teacher, much like the one in the film, who had seen too much of the world, but despite her disillusionment with it believed in the power that young people had. and just like the actor who played the teacher, she knew she had to keep laughing. because even though laughter isn't any sort of medicine, at least it's a band-aid to stick on top of the wound and hold it together.

and she realized that instead of covering the wound he had received, the man who was her father had ignored his injuries entirely, had pretended that they were not even there. because of that, it had festered and spread. and he had not bled out but had instead pulled down and stabbed at others in his effort to rise. then he'd gone through his life with an infection that seeped too deep into his soul and his mind, and somewhere along the way, the man had become the exact person he'd once hated and feared.

the girl refused for that to be her path too. so she kept slapping on those band-aids, pitiful as they were for such a large wound. every laugh, every joke - she does it over and over and over. and maybe she'll make it even longer in life than that comedian did before she too has no choice but to peel off the plastic strips, and the barrier that covers an infection that could not be avoided, and let herself, finally, lose the limb, and maybe her life in the process. just like the comedian did. but at least, then, she will die as he did too - having chosen a life with laughter in it, for the price of dying later instead of bleeding out alone and in the dark.

and if she survives? well, the price of that wound that she had to wait so long to treat will be worth it. even if it is a huge part of herself she has to cut off just to ensure that the next child doesn't know what it is to be that little boy, or to be the little girl that came next, and to be overtaken by a wound that just won't heal, or die doing everything to rid yourself of it, or take the same route as the main character in that film who saw no other way to break free.