Stop Me If You've Heard This One

by Kristen Arnett

You can tell a joke one of two ways: Open your mouth and say the damn thing. Wait for someone else to try to tell it for you.

But if I’ve learned anything from clowning, it’s that there’s always a way to turn nothing into something.

I am a literal fucking clown.

Clowning requires a kind of steeliness that I associate with my coming-out process: the knowledge that there will always be people in life who will hate you for who and what you love.

“Loss is still loss, even if we insist it isn’t,” she says.

but it’s quite another to see his actual face—eternally youthful, while mine continues to grow and shift and age.

A phrase I often hear from Darcy: Who says punk can’t be pink?

that classic friends-to-lovers-to-friends-to-lovers lesbian pipeline—but

The kind of health insurance I have is a duct-taped first-aid kit lodged under my leaky bathroom sink.

The part that is my authentic self shrinks down so that the clown can grow in its place.

I lose myself. That’s the price I pay for art.

Knock-knock jokes spread like infectious diseases.

Is it normal to be a queer person living in a place with a government that actively tries to harm you? Is it normal to know that you might attend a gay club and be gunned down in the middle of the night? But if you don’t return to “normal,” what kind of life are you living?

I can’t stand how hard the world is, how much like the blade of a knife home can feel when wielded by people without empathy or care.

Boys get to pull pranks and make “jokes” that are really just insults, and everyone laughs because that’s just how boys are, that’s how they get to be.

It feels like everything is changing too fast, even when the change is happening too slow.

I wonder if there’s a single thing about me that people could just plain love.

It takes Darcy longer than me to get over things, possibly because she’s a Taurus, but she’d never admit that because she’s convinced astrology is for people who can’t think for themselves.

It’s no big surprise that pain fuels humor. Suffering is relatable; everyone has it tough.

if we make fun of our misery first, someone else can’t come along and make it hurt even worse. Our joke, our rules.

The things we do for love, I think. The awful, terrible things we put ourselves through in order to be loved in return.

We dealt with our feelings in a mature and healthy way. The thought is revolting.

My mother doesn’t get the joke. Must be a day that ends in y.

We’ll fuck and we’ll hurt each other and we’ll lose each other. And then maybe we’ll find each other and do it all over again. Life is like that, I think. Intimately messy, but never boring.

I’m just a clown walking into a bar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.