
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
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.
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in
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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?
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat.
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted.
Ocean Vuong • On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time.