The Emperor of Gladness

by Ocean Vuong

This stirred something in him, and he realized now how odd it was that despite her derangement of senses, she’d managed to enter such a clear, lucid state of linearity as the one they were in now. But then again, he knew nothing of dementia, what wide, unbroken vistas it might hold.

Note

then stepped into the window’s light, where he saw that her face was someone else’s.

lay back on the bags and kept very still. Inside the dumpster, the noises from the street arrived altered, their octaves warped, subdued, as if the city that once touched him was now further away.

to discard is to move on.

We always belong somewhere, if only to whatever’s holding us, and shouldn’t that be a good thing? To have your uselessness become a marker of time, waste being the proof

having lived at all? He had successfully thrown himself into the trash, and the act was so complete, so total, it felt clean. He was a container inside a container filled with containers contained by space—and somehow this made him full.