Live, Laugh, Love, Etc.
Live. Laugh. Love. Get your heart broken. Dust yourself off. Love again, harder and more fiercely than you loved before. Get your heart broken again. Get drunk for 3 weeks. Cry. Throw up on yourself in public. Grab a stranger by the collar and tell them they don’t understand love. Laugh in a way that scares people. Yell that you don’t want to live anymore.
Recalibrate. Vow to focus on yourself. On your heart. On your soul. Sing! Sing all the time. Sing, “I’m fine! I’m FIIII-IIINE!” in people’s faces when they ask how you are. Sing it louder when they look at you like they don’t believe you. Maybe back off the singing for a bit. But definitely keep looking for reasons to live. Reasons to laugh. Reasons to love. Reasons to love laughing while you live.
Channel your free time into learning an elaborate hip-hop dance. Perform it for your friends. Stop the track and start it over if you catch anyone looking away. Interrupt your friend who mutters something about cultural appropriation. Insist you’re just having fun. Point your finger straight into your dumb friend’s fun-killing face and ask her if she even remembers what fun is. Email your friends the next day and apologize. Refocus. You’re here to live. You’re here to laugh. YOU ARE HERE TO LOVE.
Book a solo trip to Costa Rica, baby!!! Buy a journal with the 3 Ls on the cover as a visual reminder for what you are about to do. Spend every waking moment leading up to your trip making your expectations astronomically high. Visualize yourself living. Picture yourself laughing. See yourself loving.
Take the trip. Get shy. Forget how to talk to people. Get diarrhea on a boat. Scream bloody murder on a ziplining excursion. Decide ziplining excursions are not for you. Finish the ziplining excursion because you have to, ma’am. Go to the beach to watch the sunset. Get sad that you don’t have anyone to watch the sunset with. Cry in your dumb dirty hostel and force yourself to fall asleep at 8:30 PM. Find your journal. Open it and write, “Good trip. Nice to get off the grid.” Never open the journal again.
Decide it’s time to dive back into the dating scene. Download the apps. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. FUCK UNDO YOU SWIPED THE WRONG WAY. Put on makeup. Go on dates. Smile. Say you’re having fun. Tell them you’re looking for someone to share laughs and love with in this thing we call life. Make things official. Instagram every happy moment. Instagram the boring ones too, but give them fun captions. Realize you’re not getting any younger. Drop hints. Make ultimatums. Get engaged!!!!!!!!! Plan a wedding that says “we’re in love and we live to laugh”.
Get married. Get comfortable. Get sick of one another. Get pregnant. Fall in love again. Have a baby. Fall out of love again. Get spooked when you can’t find yourself in the mirror. Swat away the thought that you never really knew who you were in the first place. Reach the point in parenthood when your kid thinks everything you say is the stupidest thing ever. Sort of agree. Try Zumba. Try not to compare it to that time you did hip-hop.
Get older. Too old for Zumba. Try not to think about whether or not you actually like your life. Try not to think about the fact that you can’t remember the last time you laughed. Try not to think about how long you’ve been falling out of love for. Get older still.
Wonder why you’ve spent so long resisting crying. Resisting disliking anything. Resisting death’s inevitability. Wonder if it might make you feel more alive to embrace these things. Find a certain liberty in aging. Let go of the expectations you’ve held on to so tightly for so long. Live a little bit longer. Understand that you don’t have to love everything. Stop caring about how people feel if you don’t laugh. Feel like you’re finally living. Cry. Hate. Laugh. Sob. Sneer. Love. Cackle. Live a little bit longer. Die.
