Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

Time is a mother. Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center. In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu. And the word for weakness is Yếu. How you say what you mean changes what you say. Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth. Rose, I whispered as they zipped my mother in her body bag, get out of there. Your plants are dying. Enough is enough. Time is a motherfucker, I said to the gravestones, alive, absurd. Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through. Stillness. That’s what it was. The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow, more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting. Like him, I caved. I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white weather and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, into the world, screaming and enough.