Laughing gas will kill me.

That’s not a joke, or a clever metaphor

I have a deficiency of folic acid in my blood or my spine or wherever the hell folic acid lives,

And if I inhale nitrous oxide,(laughing gas)  my nervous system will shut down

My body, my blood, my bones, will stop talking to my brain

And I will have a stroke.

A stroke is when blood is cut off from the brain

Blood carries oxygen

Without oxygen,

I will suffocate

All while my mouth draws breath and lungs inflate and deflate like the ebbing of the tides

Or they would, rather,

If the parts of my brain that controlled that drawing of breath

Hadn’t drifted off into a painful, agonizing sleep.

When I was diagnosed, at ten,

With this contraindication that seemed, for all intents and purposes, a eleventh commandment

It seemed only a symptom of a larger disease

One that had afflicted me my whole life

Of course, the folic acid deficiency has always been with me too

But through luck it was irrelevant,

And a 7-year old me did not laugh to death on his brain

Giving his last frenzied, burst of hysterical breath,

Mocking the world even as he made his exit on the faux-leather seats of a panicking dentist

But the difference between the gas of mirthful death

And the adhd, the anxiety,

The asthma that makes me choke on the acrid smoke of the backrooms I frequent

And the way my hands and skin are deaf and dumb

making me feel like the world is padded with blunting softening carpet

The difference between between those and the fact that I am one chemically induced chuckle away from choking on my own grey matter, is the randomness.

Like a passed down deed to a manor

With a leaky roof and lead pipes,

this body is inherited with all its flaws from those who came before.

And all those who came before prevailed, they lived, so I can too.

My father has adhd, my uncle sensory processing issues, my grandmother has asthma.

it’s a continuity, a community of flaws, of defects,

Of imperfections.

But this is new, not the dominant rays of the sun cracking me like dry dirt

But two recessive crescent moons, a 10-1, 100-1, 1000-1, chance

to come together in a perfect silvery circle,

to cast light on my heel.

A genetic accident, an unattainable summit on a simple punnett square

Corruption, an error, a failure, handed down to me on platter

This isn’t super important to me,

I am not consumed in angst by this chemical insufficiency

But there’s something poetic about it,

Something poem-worthy,

About being killed by laughter.

When nothing around me is funny.

What would it mean?

If I had died on the dentist’s chair?

Would anyone understand, or would it just be a fluke?

Would anyone have known there was a landmine buried in my DNA?

Or would it just be cosmic dice showing snake-eyes.

And what’s the difference?

I’d be dead either way.

It’s almost funny.

Randomness striking me down, like a stumbling clown

Only this banana peel is fatal.

Maybe that’s why I’d laugh.

I’d see that there’s no  point, no resolution

I can live my life as a story, a narrative, but that's no protection against genetics.

And no ward against being taken for no reason, no reason at all.

No security against ending the play in the middle of act 2.