On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

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

Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

To ask What’s good? was to move, right away, to joy.

Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.