When I Laugh, I Bleed

When we smile and we laugh, our faces crease in folds, they fold and dent in lines. And if we do it enough, they form wrinkles. And when we frown or worry, our faces fold. They fold and fold. In lines and creases. And all these lines and folds and creases, they show up on our skin as we grow old.

They tell a story of how we got old. We got old through happiness. We got old through worry. We got old through sadness. Things just melded into our skin, into our muscles until they formed lines. And if they were good things, they formed in crinkles around our eyes. If they were bad things, they formed in lines between our brows and lines above our brows. And if life was especially gritty, the lines formed, and formed and formed.

All of our faces crease and fold. All the lines gather and mold like geographies of countries, the countries of our lives upon our faces. Our faces are our vita; geography, our lives.

Or maybe, they didn’t form. And the lines came out of your head in silver hairs. Long, wiry things spiraling out of our heads. They remind us. Remind us and are a sign to others of what we have survived, inside, that is our own age. The wrinkles and lines line us in our minds and joints and muscles. The way we move our faces have been formed by this age, this infinite, boundless age. And our faces move in old ways while our faces look young, but in the end, our eyes tell it all.

Look. They hang in our sockets, sorrowfully, hopefully, desperately in our strange faces. Almost as if to beg to end the suffering we have known and seen, and a plea to give us hope it may end or that we may see something better. Old eyeballs in youthful faces, crying but not crying.

We walk and try to walk in malls and restaurants and on sidewalks and roam in classrooms and offices. We walk by you on your way to class and work and to your favorite buying place. We laugh and smile and comfort others, our ancient eyes sagging with fatigue in our perennial faces. We turn our mouths up in hope to cheer the dank climate of humanity while we shrivel internally in perpetual winter.

So young, so decrepit. Joints flaking off as they grind against another, no cushion, no discs left in between any bone. But we laugh and smile as they grind. They grind and grind as we make people laugh with our own morbid truths. They laugh, we laugh. They laugh because it’s genuine and true and funny.

I laugh because I’m dying.

Just much more slowly, more painfully, and more secretly than the rest.

Openly, I smile.

Openly, I laugh.

Silently, I wince.

Silently, I groan.

Silently, I cry.

Silently, I scream.

I smile again. They smile too.

My eyes in their sockets are too wide, too open. They have seen too much. They bleed into my smiling teeth.

Bleed.

My eyes are filled with blood. They can’t see.

2019