The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings. The only things we share with the city are the ambulances, being close enough to Hartford for them to come fetch us when we’re near dead or rattling away on steel gurneys without next of kin. We live on the edges but die in the heart of the state. We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.

He had never wanted to throw his name out, just the breath attached to it. The name, after all, was the only thing his mother gave him that he was able to keep without destroying.

“When did he die, your husband?” “When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.”

How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.

It did not have a name, this slaughter, and yet your loved ones were being slowly erased,

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.

Some things belong to those who lived them.”

“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all.

If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough.

For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.” He pointed with his chin at the scattered trees. “It’s all over the place, caught in all the spots where I snagged myself.”

So you don’t have to be anybody’s soldier. You can be a person doing what you do every day and that’s fucking enough. Don’t you get it?”

You still have your hands. And with these what you make is yours.”