On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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

What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know.

We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

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.

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.

Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted.

it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat.