Y.S.T.

To this girl, there were few things more haranguing than the sound of laughter, especially when she wanted nothing more than to be alone. She may have been as busy as she liked, conjugating verbs, solving equations, writing music, and she may have been as far away as her synapses would allow, but soon enough, those shrill and staccato utterances would always seep through into even her tiniest cerebral crevices and infiltrate her most intimate hiding spaces. To her it was offensive (and even disturbing) to realize that she could never truly escape.

On longer days that left her feeling cold, she would turn to hot tea. She controlled every aspect of it: its taste and its heat and its scent, but she could never fully control its temperature. Yes, she could heat the water until it began to hiss, at which point she could turn off the boiler and force the kettle's sharp vaporous tongue to sink back into its dark and mysterious mouth, but she could not control how long its heat would remain. When she would drink her tea, the only things to enter her mind were its steamy and sinewy arms that beckoned her to indulge in momentary warmth and wholeness. Those soft and streaming limbs were always welcome in her very special vestibule, and for that she would almost always oblige to its requests. And for a moment, she didn't notice the wet and stinging laughter banging on her tin brow, and more importantly, she didn't feel so hollow or alone.

How ephemeral it all was. Soon enough, the laughter began to crack a hole in her cerebral ceiling, and the girl was soon presented with a rusting reminder of who she was and who she was not. She grew to be immensely jealous of the voices of others who seemed to be able to regulate their own body temperatures (at least in the company of others), jealous of the minds not susceptible to cracking or infiltration of dark and damp thoughts. The laughter came and went like the crashing of waves does at various points of the tide, and the girl began to imagine about what it was they were laughing.

She eventually began to notice that her fingers were beginning to pale, and decided to look to her cup for relief. Clasping the cup, she looked in. The girl's previous reflection, one barely discernible in that sultry, spiced mist was no longer; staring back at her was a sad and soggy teabag that had retreated away into a dark corner of its ceramic cave, ashamed and shuddering as she breathed slowly onto it.

The laughter grew, and the girl stared back into her cup and its bloated bottom feeder. It was there all along, lurking just below its steamy surface.

I am the joke.

The laughter then began to assume consonants and vowels, and despite its inevitable murkiness, the girl was able to decipher the things that she lacked. How silly of me to think that things never grow cold, and that suppression makes everything evaporate into the ether, leaving and taking with it nothing but a single breath. The laughter continued, and she felt hollow once more. Her brain was beginning to swell with those thoughts again.

The girl clasped her lavender hands around her cup even harder now, hoping for warmth to dry her thoughts and heat her hands, but she felt nothing. It would be impossible to do so, anyway; it was always vapor. A decrepit buoy floated helplessly in a shallow pool of brown water, simultaneously suffocating in and expelling its own filth. The girl took a finger to it, half-expecting the bag to hiss, to bite, to sting, but it didn't. It remained motionless; it was nothing, and it had always been nothing, even when it was something.

The laughter receded into the dark and silent deep. She had what she wanted! And the girl sat in a dry and quiet room clutching an empty cup. But she still could not escape.