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“TALKING TO GOD ABOUT HEAVEN FROM THE BED OF A HEATHEN

You should know that although I miraculously
agreed to attend Bible camp one summer (my devoutly
pragmatic parents signed me up because the camp was free),
I don’t & have never believed in you. Yet here I am:
sitting up in bed, thinking about death, & needing
to talk to someone who (reportedly) has the inside story.
I know, though, that there are believers who don’t believe
out of fear solely. They actually love you. They reach out
& receive your touch. Like a friend, like a boyfriend, like the boy
beside me, overheating, reeking of sweat, & still (somehow)
asleep. I wish I could feel your warmth, as easily
as I feel his. But I don’t. I feel fear. I hear fear telling me I’m
a body, that’s all. & the boy I love is a body. & bodies die. No
other world, no return to this world in another form. (Annihilation.)
It isn’t that I didn’t think these were the facts before. It’s that now,
he’s here. I have to try harder. Believe the facts could be
at least a little wrong. Please, something. Some
magic, real as this ripe life with him.”
― Chen Chen

“she had to say, You better not lose him. & my mother kept that promise
till she couldn’t, she lost me, in the new country, but doesn’t
that happen to all parents & their children, one way or another,
& don’t we need to get lost? Lost, dizzy, stubbly, warm, stumbling,
whoa—that’s what it felt like, 17, kissing a boy for the first time.
Can’t forget it. Can’t forget when my mother found out & said,
This would never have happened if we hadn’t come to this country.
But it would’ve happened, every bit as dizzy, lost, back in China.
It didn’t happen because of America, dirty Americans. It was me,
my need. My father said, You have to change, but I couldn’t, can’t
give you up, boys & heat, scruff & sweet. Can’t get over you. Trying to get
over what my writer friend said, All you write about is being gay or Chinese.
Wish I had thought to say to him, All you write about is being white
or an asshole. Wish I had said, No, I already write about everything—
& everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair,
carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn,
mothers, bad habits, questions.”
― Chen Chen

“To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don’t say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work