On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?

I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked.

only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.

you got up to flick the Marlboro into the sink. “Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you. Everything.”

I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?

He’d feel it floating on the right side of his chest, just between the ribs. The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself—and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn’t me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother’s womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around.

Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.

in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid. I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it. How I want this to be true.

by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.

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.

Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain.

What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place.

when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to. And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again,

stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you.

The boy. The motor oil. The body, it fills up. And your thirst overflows what holds it. And your ruin, you thought it would nourish him. That he would feast on it and grow into a beast you could hide in.