laughter

In our empty kitchen
she held me,
shaking with overlapping sobs.
And I held back –
held on for dear life,
stunned into an impervious state.
It was a crying so surreal;
so severe, that it sounded
like wails of laughter
bouncing off the walls of the room
and slapping my face like
an unyielding torrent of anguish.
The ambiguous streak that divides
the two forms of hysterics
is shockingly obscure.
I had to check her face –
make sure the tears were real,
make sure the maternal body
upon my frame
was racked with grief,
not laughter;
seizing with pain,
not laughter.
It was a sobbing so intense
it tricked me into laughing.
I couldn’t stop.
An uninvited grin spit out the anomaly
in that drenched kitchen,
but she mistook my heaves for empathizing sobs.
And as I stood letting her tears
soak my hair and neck with guilt,
I marked the moment
where the weight of those years
finally took its toll
and made me laugh as
my mother cried with the sadness
of an entire dying world.