Now My Mother's Voice Lives With Me

From Saad Jones in Gay Mag (the journal edited by Roxane Gay)

[S]everal years after we buried her, I heard my mother laugh. Not in a dream, in the middle of the day. That same richness, that same timbre. I snapped my neck around, looking. Only to realize as the last traces of the sound colored the air, that my mother’s laughter was coming from my own throat. The person who had made me laugh, a coworker, had already walked away, but I stood alone in the hallway for a moment, delighted and heartbroken at once. I felt silly holding my hand to my throat for a moment, but I didn’t know what else to do. I even tried to recreate the laugh, to no avail. I just stood there, humbled, realizing that the laughter is mine to receive but never to own.