On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pane and leap out the window.

He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. The boys crowded around me, sensing entertainment. I could smell their fresh-laundered clothes, the lavender and lilac in the softeners.

I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us.

“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?”

Willful ignorance

both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy.

Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.

she says, eyes lowered—and

Sometimes, when we worked fast enough, we’d catch up to them, the sound of their blades louder and louder, until you could hear their lungs working as they cut, the stalks falling in bright green splashes around their hunched backs. You could hear the water inside the stems as the steel broke open the membranes, the ground darkening as the plants bled out.

And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time.

then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love.

They were playing in the backyard. Not a game, exactly, but an embodiment of vague excitement, the kind known only to very young children, where delight rushes through them simply by running across an empty field not yet recognized as a tiny backyard in a shitty part of town.

they were no older than six, an age where one could be ecstatic just by moving.

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.

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

the man stopped, walked over to the dog wagging its tail, and placed the treat in the dog’s open mouth, proving again that it was hunger, only hunger, not music that gave the dog its human skill,

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

“Fuck Coca-Cola.” “Yeah, Sprite for life, fuckers,” I added, not knowing then what I know now: that Coca-Cola and Sprite were made by the same damn company. That no matter who you are or what you love or where you stand, it was always Coca-Cola in the end.

They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same.

They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness?

They will want you to succeed, but never more than them.

I miss you more than I remember you.

traffic light blinking yellow. Because that’s what the lights do in our town after midnight—they forget why they’re here.

When Houdini failed to free himself from his handcuffs at the London Hippodrome, his wife, Bess, gave him a long, deep kiss. In doing so, she passed him the key that would save him. If there’s a heaven I think it looks like this.

You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.

And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form?

I am thinking of freedom again, how the calf is most free when the cage opens and it’s led to the truck for slaughter.

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.

with a family tree that looked more like a barbed-wire fence.

The father whose only connection to Paul was metal: the shell lodged in his old man’s brain from the day he stormed Omaha beach; the brass Paul lifted to his mouth to make music.

“what were you before you met me?” “I think I was drowning.” A pause. “And what are you now?” he whispered, sinking. I thought for a second. “Water.”