On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

The whole point of us meeting was to say goodbye, or rather, just to be side by side, a farewell of presence, of proximity, the way men are supposed to do.

“Don’t be scared,” his voice says. He stares at the people glowing in the diner. The tenderness in his tone holds me to the seat, the washed-out town.

Realizing, too late, that it’s useless to show up unannounced at a dead boy’s house to be greeted only by his grief-fucked father, I keep walking.

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work. Take it or leave it. The body, I mean.

But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.

And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong?

The feeling brought on, not by tenderness, as from caress, but by the body having no choice but to accommodate pain by dulling it into an impossible, radiating pleasure.

It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and bà ngoạis were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coats dusted with fresh snow as they huddled, steaming down the winter block—their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, but then ghosting into family legends.

The first colors of evening fall upon the wooden fence and everything ambers, as if we’re in a snowglobe filled with tea.

Only something in pain could make a sound you could enter.