On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

At recess the next day, the kids would call me freak, fairy, fag. I would learn, much later, that those words were also iterations of monster.

How I fled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library stacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences—and least of all that those sentences would save me.

Only in this twitching quiet did her brain, wild and explosive during waking hours, cool itself into something like calm.

To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.

They say that trauma affects not only the brain, but the body too, its musculature, joints, and posture. Lan’s back was perpetually bent—so much so that I could barely see her head as she stood at the sink.

“The snow in my hair,” she explained, “it makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog? The snow is rooting into me.”

I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.

He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.

Their shadows cleared above me. I let my nose drip with snot. I stared at my feet, at the shoes you bought me, the ones with red lights that flashed on the soles when I walked. My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.

Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

Yes, of course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter. With the laws of the universe made new, I sat back and watched as we broke through one mountain after another.

No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.

Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.

It has started to rain; the dirt around the woman’s bare feet is flecked with red-brown quotation marks—her body a thing spoken with.

Is there a language for falling out of language?

Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of sky stolen from a clear day.

A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.

Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, one of the greatest golfers in the world is, like you, Ma, a direct product of the war in Vietnam.

We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.

When you’re nine, you know when to shut your mouth, so I did,

And I let him run his mind. I let him empty. I didn’t stop him because you don’t stop nothing when you’re nine.

When Earl finally heard news of Tiger Phong’s death, Tiger Woods had already won his first Masters. “Boy, does this ever hurt,” Earl said. “I’ve got that old feeling in my stomach, that combat feeling.”

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are. To be or not to be. That is the question.

To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.

Memory is a choice.

Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands. Their once supple contours I’ve never felt, the palms already callused and blistered long before I was born, then ruined further from three decades in factories and nail salons. Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. How you’d come home, night after night, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep inside a minute. I’d come back with your glass of water and you’d already be snoring, your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish.

I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it. How I want this to be true.

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place.

There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras.

The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish.

as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.

And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room?

In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.

Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power.

By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.

that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already inside us.

Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?

We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.

Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.

I wanted to leave, to say stop. But the price of confessing, I learned, was that you get an answer.

It was a gay club and the boys, because that’s who they were—sons, teenagers—looked like me: a colored thing born of one mother, rummaging the dark, each other, for happiness.