On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it.

If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.

it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.

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.