Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

I thought the fall would kill me but it only made me real

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine Van Gogh singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into his cut ear & feeling peace.

I’m not sad, he told me once, laughing, I’m just always here. See, officer? Magic is real—we all disappear. Why aren’t you laughing? No, not beauty—but you & I outliving it. Which is more so.

Maybe I wanted, at last, to feel him against me—& it worked. As the colors spun through the windshield, wild metal clanking our shoulders, the sudden wetness warm everywhere, he slammed into me & we hugged for the first time in decades. It was perfect & wrong, like money on fire.

I didn’t know god saw in us a failed attempt at heaven. Didn’t know my eyes had three shades of white but only one image of my mother. She’s standing under an ancient redwood, sad that her time on earth is all she owns. O human, I’m not mad at you for winning but that you never wished for more.

I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.

Once, at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn for an “artsy vibe,” a young woman said, sipping her drink, You’re so lucky. You’re gay plus you get to write about war and stuff. I’m just white. [Pause] I got nothing. [Laughter, glasses clinking] Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold. Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow. Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.

It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine-gun fire. Still, my people made a rhythm this way. A way. My people, so still, in the photographs, as corpses. My failure was that I got used to it. I looked at us, mangled under the Time photographer’s shadow, and stopped thinking, get up, get up.

I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else. To be a dam for damage. My shittyness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.

***

The snow has started up again, whitening the path as though nothing happened. But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked for and choose a place where your wanting ends—which part of war do we owe this knowledge?

stop writing about your mother they said but I can never take out the rose it blooms back as my own pink mouth how can I tell you this when you’re always to the right of meaning as it pushes you further into white space

Then he kissed me as if returning a porcelain shard to my cheek.

Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.