The Laugh Track

I start laughing in the produce aisle.

Not a giggle — a full-body cackle that echoes off the apples. A father shields his kid with a shopping cart. A woman blinks at me, clutching a cantaloupe.

“Sorry,” I gasp, but saying sorry makes me laugh harder.

Nothing is funny. The apples shine under fluorescent light, each one polished like it’s been crying. My stomach spasms. My eyes water. A stranger asks if I’m okay, and I nod like someone caught mid-exorcism.

This is how it begins.

Sometimes it starts in the shower. Sometimes brushing my teeth, the foam bubbling as I laugh into the mirror. It happens in elevators, during job meetings, at funerals. It doesn’t need a reason. The laugh just arrives, like a relative who doesn’t knock.

My mother used to say, We’re a smiling family. It’s how we get through.

She said it with mascara on, hiding a bruise high on her shoulder. She said it while tugging a stuck zipper. I stood behind her, pushing the corners of my mouth up with my fingers, practicing.

Smile for the neighbors.

Smile for your father.

Smile so no one asks questions.

Sometimes we really did laugh — the time a roach died in the toaster and popped up with the bread. We screamed, gagged, and laughed until we cried. That was before the laugh became a creature I couldn’t cage.

Now it’s my shadow.

At checkout, I hum to calm it. Humming sometimes helps, like covering a scream with a song. I hand my card to the cashier, a teenage girl with a sticker that says I’M NEW.

“Busy day?” she asks.

“Isn’t every day an open mic for the universe?” I say and snort before I can stop myself.

Her eyes dart toward the manager. A printer behind the pharmacy bleats like a goat. A toddler sings “Baby Shark.” It’s too much. I laugh again.

“Busy,” I say, still shaking.

On the walk home I practice breathing in time with the traffic lights: in on green, hold on yellow, thin breath on red. A bus roars past, windows full of faces turned toward anything but me. In the glass of a storefront I catch my reflection — the grin still sitting there after the laugh has trotted off, a dog forgetting it isn’t on the leash anymore.

My jaw aches by the time I reach my building. I massage the hinge until it clicks, a tiny door with a rusted latch. In the elevator I try to settle my features into neutral. My neighbor, Ms. Alvarez, murmurs, “Rough day?” and I hear the red ON AIR light flick in my skull. I show my teeth like a hostage note. “Just peachy,” I say. She presses her purse closer to her body the way people do around stray dogs.

My therapist, Dr. Ames, has the calm of someone who could defuse bombs for a living.

When I first came in wheezing laughter, she didn’t say “stop.” She handed me a warm bean bag. “Hold this,” she said. “Feel where you are.”

When I could finally breathe, she said, “Let’s name it.”

“What if naming it gives it a Social Security number?” I said. “What if it starts paying taxes?”

“This isn’t a joke,” she said.

“I know,” I said, and laughed again.

Inside my head, there’s a red light like the one in TV studios: APPLAUSE. Sometimes I swear I see it above people’s heads: my boss, my mother, the police officer who pulled me over because he thought I was drunk when really my shoulders were shaking with a laugh that couldn’t find air. The light goes on, and my mouth obeys.

“Humor can be a shield,” she tells me. “But sometimes the shield becomes a wall.”

“What’s the alternative?” I ask. “Crying in cereal aisles?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

She gives me homework: Count to five before I make a joke. Say something true without decorating it. Join a grief group — Grief in Context, Tuesdays at seven.

“Write down when the laugh comes,” she says. “We’ll map the trap.”

So I do.

Right before the grocery store incident: a car backfired outside.

Before that: a display of cheap bouquets and a Get Well Miranda card.

Then memory. My mother in a hospital bed, telling a priest joke that wasn’t funny, both of us laughing until she coughed, and smiling wider to hide the pain.

It’s never one thing. The laugh is a conspiracy.

At work, during a meeting about layoffs, I joke about the PowerPoint saving us all. People chuckle. Miguel, who’s losing his job, doesn’t. I smile too wide. He looks at me like I’ve betrayed gravity.

Later, alone in a stall, I bite the fleshy part of my thumb until I taste iron. The pain is a rope I can grab to climb out of the laugh’s well. It works for thirty seconds. Then the laugh returns, patient, as if it was waiting in the next stall.

At a wedding, I laugh during the vows — at “sickness and health.” The echo fills the church like a thin crack racing across a windshield. Everyone pretends not to hear it. The bride’s face blanks for a beat. The groom squeezes her hands a fraction too hard, as if to fuse them.

Afterward at the reception I corner the bar like it’s a lifeguard. A stranger with glitter on her eyelids says, “You’re the guy from the church.” I pretend not to hear. The DJ plays a song about forever and my ribs throb like they’re trying to escape. I leave before the cake, laughing into my wrist like a cough.

At my mother’s funeral, I lose control. The laugh begins as a cough, turns to sobs, then splits open into hysteria. I tip a floral spray over trying to steady myself. Lilies scatter like bones.

“She would’ve—she—she would’ve thought—” I gasp, trying to frame it as love. But the sound is wrong.

They escort me out. I catch my reflection in a hallway mirror, gums bared, a skull’s grin. My tie looks like it’s strangling me for effect.

In the bathroom, a little boy washing his hands sees me and smiles reflexively. Instinct: when we see teeth, we show ours.

The kindness of it almost stops me. Almost.

The internet makes everything immortal.

Someone filmed me at the funeral. The clip circulates. Grieving Man Laughs at Mother’s Funeral. Comments pour in:

“Avant-garde performance art.”

“This guy needs meds.”

“LOL forever.”

“Who records at a funeral?”

“I hope he dies.”

The cruelty doesn’t hurt as much as the praise. Someone calls it “brilliant satire.” It isn’t art. It’s malfunction.

That night, I dream of a studio audience. Lights blind me. A glowing red sign says APPLAUSE.

Someone in the dark yells, “Stop if you need to!” but I can’t see them. The sign gets brighter. I laugh until my jaw unhinges and my teeth clap like hands.

When I wake, my molars ache as if I’ve been chewing stones.

“Where does the laugh live in your body?” Dr. Ames asks.

“In my chest,” I say. “Like bees in a jar.”

“And when you try to stop?”

“They sting everything.”

She nods. “Then maybe the goal isn’t to kill the bees. Maybe it’s to open the jar.”

“How?” I say.

“Practice,” she says. “And other people.”

She wants me to join the group.

“I hate groups,” I say. “Basement chairs, coffee like sump water, strangers crying into napkins.”

“You already know them,” she says.

Grief in Context meets in a church basement beneath a muscled Jesus nailed above a folding table of cookies. Twelve chairs in a circle. Twelve people with ghosts sitting in their laps.

A woman named Danica leads. A teenage boy picks at a hangnail until it bleeds. A man with arms like tree trunks stares at his shoes. A woman in a red scarf holds her jaw the way you cradle a broke thing.

“Welcome,” Danica says. “No need to share if you’re not ready.”

People go around telling stories. One lost a husband. One lost a dog. One lost both parents in the same month. Each story feels like someone handing me a photograph that burns just to touch.

When it’s my turn, I try to say, “My mother died.” The laugh jumps out instead — sharp, like a hiccup.

“It’s okay,” Danica says softly. “You don’t have to make it okay for us.”

Her words land like a needle finding a nerve.

The man with tree-trunk arms shares how his brother once choked on a grape at Thanksgiving — saved by a slap on the back — and how everyone laughed then, and how thirty years later his brother died anyway. He laughs as he finishes, quietly, humanly. The room holds it like a small flame.

I try to match that kind of laugh. Mine comes out manic. I leave the room, forehead pressed to the cinderblock wall, counting to fifty. When I return, no one acts like I failed.

On the fourth meeting, I manage to say, “My mother died,” without laughing until the end.

“Yeah,” the teenager says. Just that. A word like a pebble, warm from the sun.

For two nights after, I sleep without the studio audience.

On the third night, they return.

This time the stage is a hospital corridor. The sign hovers over the room numbers. I wear a paper bracelet and a smile that hurts.

Nurses wheel laughter on carts like oxygen tanks. It hisses through tubing into my nose. A doctor peels back my lips with gloved fingers and says to a resident, “Note the rictus,” as if I’ve been pinned and labeled in a museum drawer. In the dream I try to cry but the sound track laughs for me, a looped roar played too loud through cheap speakers.

I wake with my face numb, two wet lines clocking my temples where tears dried on their own. I sit up and stretch my mouth wide in the dark, testing it like a hinge. When I close it the silence pops inside like a joint.

There’s something I’ve never told anyone.

When I was eleven, my father made me laugh while he packed his suitcase. “You’ll finally get some sleep without my snoring,” he said.

I laughed. He left.

I learned that smiling makes departures easier.

Years later, I found the note my mother left under the sugar jar:

Remember to eat. Remember to call me. Remember to breathe.

If you must laugh, laugh with people, not at them. And if you must cry, don’t do it alone.

I bring that note to group. My hands shake as I read it aloud.

“I don’t know how to cry in front of people,” I admit.

“Sure you do,” the big man says. “You just forgot.”

“We can sit with you,” Danica says.

“I don’t want to make it a show.”

The teenager grins. “No tickets, no refunds.”

People chuckle softly. Mercy disguised as humor.

Then — silence. The good kind. The kind with room inside it.

I step into it. “I keep thinking if I laugh first,” I say, “I’ll stay in control. Like I’m beating the world to the punchline.”

“What is it you’re trying to beat?” Danica asks.

“Everything,” I say. The word leaks out like a sigh.

A tear surprises me. It’s not cinematic — just a warm line down my cheek. I don’t hide it.

The laugh sits up inside me, startled. It looks for cameras. It finds none.

“Yeah,” the teenager says again, the same way someone might say I see you.

The tears keep coming. Not pretty. Snot, breath, the works. It’s ugly, and it’s mine.

Danica places a tissue box near me — within reach, not in my hand. That small respect breaks me more than pity ever could.

“You can breathe,” someone says. I do. For the first time in a long time, the air doesn’t taste like panic.

We sit there. No one claps. No one laughs. The silence fills the room like clean water.

After, I walk home slowly, taking the long route down blocks I never use. My shoes find the cracked rhythms of sidewalks that have shifted under the heave of tree roots. In a dark shop window, televisions glow with canned laughter from a sitcom rerun. The mute captions read [LAUGHTER], [MORE LAUGHTER], [APPLAUSE], like stage directions for a species that forgot how to feel without prompts. I watch my reflection overlay the actors’ faces. For a second I am their laugh track. For a second they are my ghost.

That night I test my rooms again. I turn on the sitcom, mute, unmute, mute. With the sound off, I count my breaths to four and let the laugh inside me pace without a stage. When my shoulders start to shake, I place a hand on my sternum and press gently, the way you calm a horse. It doesn’t fix me. It slows me.

In the morning, my face aches, the honest soreness of muscles used for something other than display. On the bus, an ad commands me to SHARE MORE SMILES. I look at the floor and decide to share fewer. When the driver brakes, we sway in unison and steady together. For a blink, that feels like hope: a body of strangers choosing, however briefly, not to fall.

I keep the note on my refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an orange. When I reach for milk, I read it. When I close the door, I read it again. Sometimes I recite it in the stairwell just to hear the words move through air that is not mine alone.

Remember to eat.

Remember to call me.

Remember to breathe.

If you must laugh, laugh with people, not at them.

And if you must cry, don’t do it alone.

I memorize it like a password back into my life.

For years, I thought safety meant laughter. Now I wonder if it means stillness.

I walk home without practicing my smile in store windows. My reflection looks soft, almost new.

In my apartment, I pour water, drink it slowly. I take the note from my pocket and smooth its crease the way you smooth a scared animal. I stick it to the fridge with the orange magnet again, as if it might try to run.

I sit on the floor beside it, back against the metal. The hum of the refrigerator feels like a heartbeat that isn’t trying to entertain me.

“I’m not okay,” I say into the room.

No audience. No cue card. No applause sign.

Just breath.

The silence doesn’t scare me this time. It holds me the way laughter used to — warm, trembling, alive.

And I end there.

With silence.