I can’t explain the laugh — I’ve tried to explain it
to friends who’ve never heard it and I always fail,
it’s not a description-ready laugh, it’s not silver bell,
it’s not musical, it’s not the kind they write about.
It’s too loud for where she is, always too loud,
it catches her off guard too, you can see it happen —
something hits her funny and she’s gone,
completely gone, before she can decide to be more careful.
This is the laugh,
the completely unguarded laugh,
the one that makes strangers at other tables turn around,
the one she apologizes for and I never want her to,
the one I’d cross a room to be the reason for.
The laugh is when I know she’s all the way there —
not performing comfort, not being polite,
the laugh is when I know she forgot to be anything
other than exactly what she is.
She used to try to make it smaller in public,
cover her mouth, turn into my shoulder,
and I always hated that —
the edited portrait,
the careful rendering,
the one she thought the world deserved.
I got the unedited woman at home for years
before I understood what that meant:
that being the person someone laughs fully around
is one of the better things you can be for somebody.
She’ll go off on something completely unexpected,
some absurd detail I didn’t think was funny
until I heard her lose it over it, and then
the absurdity becomes undeniable, obvious —
she illuminates the ridiculous
by simply giving in to it completely,
and I have spent twelve years learning to see
what she sees before she has to show me.
I have a running catalog of every time I made her laugh —
not consciously, I never tried to keep it,
but they’re in there somewhere, filed by context:
the highway incident, the hotel curtain situation,
the thing I said at her sister’s wedding
that I still can’t repeat in polite company.
These are the coordinates of a life shared with someone,
the inside world that only the two of us can read.
And when she’s low —
the days she comes home
with that particular weight behind her eyes —
I know that laughter is too much to ask for,
and I don’t go fishing for it, I know better.
But on those nights when something small breaks through,
some tiny accidental funny thing
that catches her before she can stay serious —
I feel it like a hand around the heart, released.
I don’t know if she knows what it does to me.
I don’t know if I’ve ever found the right words.
But if I’m ever asked what love looks like —
the real kind, not the movie kind —
I’ll say it looks like a woman in a restaurant
laughing too loud and not quite catching herself in time,
and the guy across from her who’s been waiting
all week to be the reason that she does.