Nostalgia: Laughing Spells

I remember sitting in the corner and laughing uncontrollably and feeling all the better for it.

It was bubble tea night. 9:30 pm had come and gone and the line was out the door of the dining hall, which had the strangely appealing aura of a nineteen sixties summer camp dwelling. After sitting in front of a computer screen for the undertaking of far too many essays that I both loved and hated to write, I’d gone to see the end of semester dance concert. Afterwards, word got around that bubble tea would be served in the dining hall that night, and so I, like just about everyone else on campus, departed my dorm room to join some friends for the almost-end-of-the-school-year festivity.

I was later told that I was staggering in an intoxicated fashion down the hill towards the dining hall. In all earnestness, I’ve never touched drugs or alcohol, though I’ve heard on more than one occasion that I’ve acted, or rather, existed, as though under the influence the majority of my days. ("People don't realize that's it's possible to be so happy when sober," I've been told.) But I can swear that I only stumbled as I did out of awe over the stars. In the midst of the Berkshires with few buildings to cloud the sky and an open field that was given the name Siberia, one of my fondest memories of my college is and always will be the impeccable view of the night sky. Something in the stars taught me how to live a more erratically balanced life. I am forever grateful to them (the stars) for that.

I remember hearing my name called out by my friend further forward in the line, but it must not have quite registered as I resolved to stay absorbed in my own world in the tail of the line. Once inside, I found them at a corner table and alternated between listening to the conversation and laughing to myself. This was only one of my many inexplicable and mystifying spells of knowing bemusement (Note to readers: I am aware that I write in contradictions. Sometimes they seem more honest to me than any other sort of phrasing).

Since leaving college I’ve had these moments of delirious euphoria on a few occasions, and they are always when I feel the most like myself. I wonder what caused them to start and why I believe that they are so strongly at the heart of my essence. Perhaps it is their fading that worries me the most. In the meantime, I wait with bated breath for the onset of another moment of clarity through the medium of laughter. After all, laughter is the best medicine.