On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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.

Shifts in the narrative would occur—the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen.

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.

What is a country but a life sentence?

The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life.

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

I was pulled deeper into the current of language.

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

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.

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