On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

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

only the future revisits the past.

To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.

The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma.

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

For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.

Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. 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.

We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.

There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

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.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.

I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

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

I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room’s threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed.

Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?

his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen.

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

I miss you more than I remember you.

What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other?

And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.

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