It's not that serious

The night we remembered there’s always room for laughter

My dad never takes anything seriously. I’ve watched people find him insufferable, and I’ve watched others decide he’s the funniest guy they’ve ever met. My opinion of him lives somewhere in between. He’s also my best friend.

When my dad turned sixty, I reflected on everything he’d taught me. One thing stood out: there is nothing in life too serious not to laugh about.

However sad I’ve been—angry, distressed, or depleted—not once has he failed to make me laugh.

this picture of us sums us up pretty well

That’s what I’m thinking about as I sit at our old regular bar in our old regular small town. Within these walls, my three best friends and I (Dad excluded) spent most of our high school weekends and the in-between years that followed, before we all moved to cities separated by oceans.

This bar, which we called McLaren’s because we’ve always been obsessed with How I Met Your Mother, was our stomping ground—our safe place. Other people would come and go, but we stayed.

Ten years or so have passed since we first stepped into the place as wide-eyed teenagers.

It’s packed. Five p.m. on a Saturday. January third. The cold burns my cheeks as I step inside and spot my friends right away. Only two of them are here; our fourth member spent New Year’s in Mexico and is still there. They squeal when they see me and my boyfriend, and half the people in the bar turn their heads.
I used to be embarrassed by that.

from pinterest

We hug for a long time, even though we just saw each other for new years. However much time I get with them, it never feels quite enough.

I sit down; my elbows stick to the table as I lean over, asking my friends how they are. My boyfriend brings me a beer. It glides down, the familiar fizz and the anticipation of a good night warming me.

I glance at the window. It’s still snowing. The warm light in here is a stark contrast to the sharp blue and black outside, broken only by the falling snow. It never snows here, in southern Sweden. It all feels a bit timeless.

The mandatory “How was your day?” chatter gets sidetracked within three minutes, and my friend starts ranting about her life. She’s strawberry-blonde, curly-haired, and eternally positive. But now her brows are furrowed, her shoulders slumped, a newfound crease between her eyes.

“I fucked up,” she says. She tells us how she missed the deadline to apply for her dream job. “How could I be so stupid?”

I feel myself deflating. I hate when she talks herself down like that, which she does too often. She chugs her beer, and we laugh a little because the rest of us have barely made a dent in ours.

The tension eases, just a bit.

“But it wasn’t your fault,” we say. “They have to reopen the application. Anything else would be insane.” We’re all sure of it. Yes, she waited until the final day to apply (she’s a crippling perfectionist, always using every last second to overthink her work—we’re the same in that way), but it wasn’t her fault the site went down for maintenance just before the deadline and stayed that way the next day. Of course, they’d extend it.
We tell her this, but she isn’t convinced.

“It’s typically Italian,” she says. “They won’t open it again.”

Normally, we would have laughed at that—the Italian way—but she looks too depleted. Last spring, she moved to Rome for a semester to write her thesis. Within a week, she’d fallen in love with the city. There was no way she was moving back home. But it hadn’t been all easy.

“The application doesn’t reopen for another six months. And I’m all out of money.”

And it doesn’t stop there.

Another thirty minutes pass before she tells us about her boss.

“She makes me miserable.”

Like me, my friend is a people pleaser. Somehow, when it comes to work, neither of us remembers our worth. It’s as if signing a contract means signing over our souls. We put up with a lot of shit. But this was another level.

Her boss sends her daily seven-minute voice messages explaining how much my friend sucks at her job. The next day, she’ll invite her to lunch, ask if it’s “too early to drink?” and order a whiskey at 11 a.m. To top it off, as my friend steps into the bathroom, another voice note arrives.

It’s her boss telling her how “crazy” she’s being for not changing her flight back to Rome—moving it two days earlier—just to meet on a Saturday, unpaid, and listen to how terrible she is at her job. We trade incredulous looks. Our friend shrinks further into her seat.

The music is loud. A group of guys squeezes into the last available seats behind me. I’m basically sitting back-to-back with one of them.

For a moment, I see us from outside myself. There’s my friend, on the verge of a breakdown. My other friend, also curly-haired, with big, brown eyes always full of emotion, leans over and holds her hand. My boyfriend hovers nearby, wanting to help but not knowing what to say.

The music tries to drown out their voices. A beer bottle shatters on the floor behind the bar. And suddenly, it clicks.

I think about my dad.

“You know what?” I say. “Fuck it. It’s not that serious.”

The music hits a crescendo. A second of quiet. Another.

Then we start laughing.

Hesitant at first, it bursts out of us in a wave of relief. It feels never-ending, as if the laughter is swallowing everything else and leaving room for nothing but ecstasy. My friend looks almost resurrected, as if something deep and unforgiving has finally left her.

My boyfriend starts quoting Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson), quoting Charlie Chaplin:

“A life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long-shot. If you sit back visually on a situation, it automatically becomes funnier.”

My friends’ eyes go wide, and we marvel at how true it is. I’m struck by how that’s exactly what I had done in that moment, without even realizing it.

I wonder if Dad has heard that quote.

We’re still laughing as my friend turns her life into a live sketch, mimicking her boss and exaggerating the absurdity of it all (she is a natural-born actor). For a while, she had forgotten who she was. She’d made her problems her identity, and they had stripped her of that life, that joy, that always permeates her. She had lost faith in herself.

Her problems aren’t fixed now. But at least she’s present. At least she’s reclaimed a piece of her, a very crucial, precious piece, back for herself.

We order another round. The guy behind me pushes his chair into mine, and I spill a little beer on the table. I have nothing to dry it with. I let it add to the stickiness, my own contribution. The snow is still falling outside. I smile a little, letting my friends’ voices merge with the music, an all-consuming sound.

I make a mental note to tell my dad about it. How we’d forgotten there is always room for laughter, and how he reminded us. I’ll tell him about this sentence I read in The Power of Now: how no darkness can survive in the presence of light. I’ll tell him how he’d already taught me that; I just needed a little reminder.

I scoff a little, already hearing the joke he’ll make about it.

---