On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

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

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

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

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

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?

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

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

ESTOU MALUCO.

To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A 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.

vou ter um avc

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

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