I used to think humour was universal—
like gravity, or heartbreak,
or the way cereal gets soggy faster when you're sad.
Turns out, it's just another dialect
we never learned to translate.
She says something
with the sparkle of a punchline in her eye,
and I nod,
like I'm listening to jazz with earmuffs on.
And I say something
(laced with a wink, or a sigh, or whatever my version of wit is)
and she blinks,
as if I'd just read the ingredients off a cereal box.
We orbit the same kitchen
laughing on different frequencies.
She could be hilarious—
a whole sitcom I never tuned into.
And maybe I'm
a knock-knock joke without a door.
I don't expect laughs.
God no.
I know I'm not funny—
I've got all the timing of a broken microwave,
the punchline of a soggy sponge.
But a smile would be nice.
A "got it."
A "ha."
A shared echo of what we were trying to say.
Maybe humour isn't lost—
it's just misplaced,
buried beneath layers
of misunderstandings,
hidden somewhere between
"I was kidding"
and
"Were you?"
It's not even about the joke.
It's that
it never lands.
And I don't know
if it's me crashing
or her runway missing from my map.
Maybe love is just
two clowns in mismatched shoes
trying to juggle invisible pins
and not laughing at the same fall.
Maybe humour's a dance
and we keep stepping on each other's metaphors.
Maybe it's not that we don't care—
it's that the radio's on
but tuned to separate storms.
And still,
I love her like the last laugh in a quiet room.
Like a comic with no mic
still hoping for the one smile that gets it.
And maybe she loves me
in her own stand-up set,
one I'm always two drinks too deep to follow.
How can we speak the same language
yet still need subtitles
for our jokes?
Irony laughs louder than either of us ever could.
Rarely do we meet
on the same syllable.
Simple things
become riddles.
Timing's off.
And still,
I wait for the day she laughs.
And knows I meant it.
And I catch her joke
before it dissolves.
How can everything and nothing make sense?
