On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you—but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.

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

To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.

The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

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. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

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

You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look.

my heart is already breaking

“Who yoo arrgh, messeur?” she asked the plastic man in broken English and French. In one jerking motion, she pressed his radio to her ear and listened intently, her eyes on me. “You know what they telling me, Little Dog?” she whispered in Vietnamese. “They say—” She dipped her head to one side, leaned in to me, her breath a mix of Ricola cough drops and the meaty scent of sleep, the little green man’s head swallowed by her ear. “They say good soldiers only win when their grandmas feed them.”

To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.

He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.

Then you pulled me into you, my chin pressed hard to your shoulder. “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?” You pulled back. “You have to be a real boy and be strong. You have to step up or they’ll keep going. You have a bellyful of English.”

Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.

No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely?

Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

The monkey is tied to a beam under the table. It jostles about. With its mouth muffled behind a leather strap, its screams sound more like the reel of a fishing rod cast far across a pond.

What the fuck, i hate this so so much

story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.

The brain of the macaque monkey is the closest, of any mammal, to a human’s.

You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers and sons, is considered taboo—so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say, “This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole!” Startled, her perm throbbing, the clerk turned and clacked away on her heels. You looked down at me. “What the hell did you say?”

lmao

We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.

“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you. Everything.”

I do deeply understand that the separation for her is to not confuse him. But he not growing up in a warzone doesnt understand that emotional connrction is real enough for him. I see both sides so painfully

“No,” I say after a while, “I don’t got any other grandpa. So I wanna keep calling you that.”

I don’t know what I’m saying. 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?

“You said that the other kids lived more than you.

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

The cold, like river water, rises to their throats. Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.

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

Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth?

Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else.

when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.

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

“Unlike your brother,” you said, “you were not born until we knew you’d live.”

Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.

Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone.

To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

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

Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.

Are you cold? Don’t you think it’s strange that to warm yourself is to basically touch the body with the temperature of its marrow?

We try to preserve life—even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

He was wearing his gold cross, the one he never takes off, and it kept poking at my cheek. So I took it in my mouth to keep it steady. It tasted like rust, salt, and Trevor.

“Don’t worry about that. You heard?” The water moved around me, through my legs. “Hey.” He did that thing where he made a fist under my chin and tilted my head up to meet his gaze, a gesture that would usually get me to smile. “You heard me?”

I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That’s what I was.

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