On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.

Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?

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

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.

What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.

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. A Little Dog shield.

The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma.

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

“Stop crying. You’re always crying!”

“You have to find a way, Little Dog,” you said into my hair. “You have to because I don’t have the English to help you. I can’t say nothing to stop them. You find a way. You find a way or you don’t tell me about this ever again, you hear?”

Shifts in the narrative would occur—the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.

Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan.

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.

But which land? Which border that was crossed and erased, divided and rearranged?

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.

One does not “pass” in America, it seems, without English.

To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time.

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. A question, yes, but not a choice.

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.

Lo siento, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. Because by then my sorry had already changed into something else. It had become a portion of my own name—unutterable without fraudulence.

And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.

Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.

That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

But the price of confessing, I learned, was that you get an answer.

Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.

Because the calf waits in its cage so calmly to be veal.

Because you remembered and memory is a second chance.

I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.

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.

I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends.

The truest ruins are not written down.

A ruin without location, like a language.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.”

What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher?

The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.

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.

The truth is memory has not forgotten us.

We try to preserve life—even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

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

Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another.

All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.

The butterfly tumbles the length of the yard, its wings resembling that corner of Toni Morrison’s Sula I dog-eared so many times the tiny ear broke off one morning in New York, fluttered down the liquid winter avenue.

Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.

To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.