On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.

What’s your theory—about anything? I know if I asked you, you’d laugh, covering your mouth, a gesture common among the girls in your childhood village, one you’ve kept all your life, even with your naturally straight teeth. You’d say no, theories are for people with too much time and not enough determination. But I know of one.

It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.

“Everything good is always somewhere else,”

When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure.

Because something in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included.

Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ.

Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?

And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong?

What are we if not what the light says we are?

I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living.