The Great Jokester

A young black girl approaches me and tells me It's easier to hear the rain fall than it is to watch it. Then opens her eyes wide and expectant, her lips pulling back over her beautiful, white teeth. But I'm looking through my reflection in the window to the outside where the snow is falling.

Snow: the most lazy of all of Mother Nature's children save ice. I watch as the air caresses it, loves it, passes it through it's silky fingers before discarding it, like an afterthought, onto the ground.

I catch my own eye and look at its' intricacies as the child gives up on me and moves to the next table. I try to stare at this picture in the window, this self portrait, to see if I can capture my own eye moving; see if I can make out the moment when I looked away.

Down the tables, the young girl has received the answer to her riddle and her ebony hair, braided into two separate locks, bounces as she Hardy Hars with the other patron. I wonder if she even understands what she is doing, or if she's laughing and grabbing her knees because that was the reaction of the person from whom she first heard the joke.

A car skids on the ice. This car cannot stop. This car honks its' horn, trying to draw attention, trying to signal the car that's about to go, that's about to enter the intersection, trying to get it to stop. The cars collide and the world hugs herself with a sighs as everybody stops. Stops, everything stops, everything except the snow that's falling and the great jokester, the one that is still laughing at the joke.

I feel my body begin to convulse, a deep tremor hits me in the stomach, racing up the same path as the vomit has torn so many times before. It's uncontrollable now; this has passed beyond the realm of politeness. I reach out to a table for support, but knock over a chair as I begin to run the blockade out of the coffee shop.

For the briefest of infinities, I feel it. My feet hit the ice, my knees buckle from over compensation and gravity sends me crashing to the ground, with no sound.

The feeling comes gushing out of me, gaining more and more momentum until at last I am laughing so hard that tears are running to standstill; tears turning into ice and the ambulance finally arrives.