Tears Just Wanna Have Fun. by: Luis Barroso-Louie

(Afer “Putting the FUN in Funeral” by Sadey Fournier)

At a funeral, my face is a slip-n-slide, into a log fume with a hundred-millimeter drop. Tat’s pretty steep for most tears.

A four-inch death drop with their hands raised, smiling for the camera as they scream, streaming to the bottom. Te black threads of my suit are the splash zone.

At a funeral, my eyes become experts at saying, “thank you”, “yes, I’m listening”, “no, I’m not spiraling into a death drop, I’m actually happy to be here, because this is a celebration and I want to hear your random memory instead of hiding in the bathroom taking shots of tequila.”

No longer sure where the splash zone is, all I feel is dry dampness around my neck. I had no idea a desert and a swamp could co-exist this way, but there it is: my stale chafng skin using some sticky polyester-cotton blend as a poncho.

I spent too much time over that open casket, it feels like a broken spider web latched itself to the back of my neck.

At a funeral, I run out of things to say faster than a death drop. Faster than my eyes can lie. I wonder if my tears clapped at the end of this ride, if they immediately got back in line, if they went back to school and wrote about it as the best summer trip ever, or if they wanted to forget about it entirely because the wait in line was terrible, the food tasted like it was sunbathing in a splash zone of hot dog water & a chef’s neck sweat, and overall: it was hands-down the worst funeral they’ve ever been to.

I’m sure it won’t be the last, I’m healthier than I give myself credit for.

I’ve been dropped so many times that bracing for impact is no longer a refex.

I’ve been hanging by a black thread for so long it feels like my Spidey senses have vertigo, that some nights wake me up from a dead sleep into the blanketed jaws of life’s death roll, leaving my insides in a sufocating negative-300-thread-count death knot, so I try to dead lif my heart out of my chest to let some dead air in and leave it at a dead drop, for Jesus, Lucifer, Odin’s son, whoever makes that dead sprint the fastest to be the frst to claim it.

At a funeral, an amusement park for tears, a polygraph for depressed dilated pupils, a winner’s podium for the Gods in charge of departed souls, a celebration for a loved one gone too soon, and I can’t help but think: this shit goes by so much faster in the movies.