On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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

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.

Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth?

What is a country but a life sentence?

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.

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?

Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away.

these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included. The

Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.