On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

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.

I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.

Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.

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.