To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.

gravity. 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 why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?

Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached

But the price of confessing, I learned, was that you get an answer.

I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.

What I wanted to say to them, as I rode away, and also the next morning, all mornings, is what I want to say to you now: Sorry. Sorry that it would be so long before they would see their loved ones, that some might not make it back across the desert border alive, taken by dehydration and exposure or murdered by drug cartels or the right-wing crack

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.