quotes from on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong that i cannot stop thinking of:
two languages cancel each other out, suggests barthes, beckoning a third. sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. in which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.
because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. because love, at its best, repeats itself. shouldn’t it?
who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? who will be lost in ourselves? a story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. to open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.
we sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.
i was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it. i don’t know what i’m saying. 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 wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, i thought. you take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.
what if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? the blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. why did i feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than i did having touched him?
what do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? a martyr? a weakling? no, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop.
sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.
do you remember the happiest day of your life? what about the saddest? do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?
and you wanted to be real, to be swallowed by what drowns you only to surface, brimming at the mouth.
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.
there’s a word trevor once told me about, one he learned from buford, who served in the navy in hawaii during the korean war: kipuka. the piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. only by enduring does it earn its name. lying on the mat with you, i cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. but I know better.
my stomach forced up but it was too late. in minutes, i became more of myself. which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, i could want it. i could kiss it.
the thing is, i don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as i don’t want my happiness to be othered. they’re both mine. i made them, dammit. what if the elation i feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something i fought hard for? maybe i jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when i learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. what if i'm running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?
i remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted. i remember thinking you and lan should be saints.
let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.
