On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

  You search me for answers, for cuts, feeling my pockets, under my shirt.

  Slowly, you lie down on your side. The space between us thin and cold as a windowpane. I turn away—even if what I want most is to tell you everything.

  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.

  There’s a word Trevor once told me about, one he learned from Buford, who served in the navy in Hawaii during the Korean War: kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. Lying on the mat with you, I cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. But I know better.

  You place a sticky hand on my neck: lavender lotion. Rain drums the gutters along the house. “What is it, Little Dog? You can tell me. Come on, you’re making me scared.”

  “I hate him, Ma,” I whisper in English, knowing the words seal you off from me. “I hate him. I hate him.” And I start to cry.

  “Please, I don’t know what you’re saying. What is that?”

  I reach back, clutching two of your fingers, and press my face into the dark slot under the bed. On the far end, near the wall, too far for anyone to reach, beside an empty water bottle, a single sock crumpled and filmed with dust. Hello.

  Dear Ma—

  * * *

  Let me begin again.

  * * *

  I am writing because it’s late.

  * * *

  Because it’s 9:52 p.m. on a Tuesday and you must be walking home after the closing shift.

  * * *

  I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain.

  * * *

  For the first time in a long time, I’m trying to believe in heaven, in a place we can be together after all this blows over up.

  * * *

  They say every snowflake is different—but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned.

  * * *

  I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed.

  * * *

  —

  You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes.

  * * *

  Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl.

  * * *

  I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.

  * * *

  Take the long way home with me. Take the left on Walnut, where you’ll see the Boston Market where I worked for a year when I was seventeen (after the tobacco farm). Where the Evangelical boss—the one with nose pores so large, biscuit crumbs from his lunch would get lodged in them—never gave us any breaks. Hungry on a seven-hour shift, I’d lock myself in the broom closet and stuff my mouth with cornbread I snuck in my black, standard-issue apron.

  * * *

  Trevor was put on OxyContin after breaking his ankle doing dirt bike jumps in the woods a year before I met him. He was fifteen.

  * * *

  OxyContin, first mass-produced by Purdue Pharma in 1996, is an opioid, essentially making it heroin in pill form.

  * * *

  I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.

  * * *

  Take it or leave it. The body, I mean.

  * * *

  Take a left on Harris St., where all that’s left of the house that burned down that summer during a thunderstorm is a chain-linked dirt lot.

  * * *

  The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.

  * * *

  After a month on the Oxy, Trevor’s ankle healed, but he was a full-blown addict.

  * * *

  —

  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. Once, after my fourteenth birthday, crouched between the seats of an abandoned school bus in the woods, I filled my life with a line of cocaine. A white letter “I” glowed on the seat’s peeling leather. Inside me the “I” became a switchblade—and something tore. My stomach forced up but it was too late. In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.

  * * *

  The truth is none of us are enough enough. But you know this already.

  * * *

  The truth is I came here hoping for a reason to stay.

  * * *

  Sometimes those reasons are small: the way you pronounce spaghetti as “bahgeddy.”

  * * *

  It’s late in the season—which means the winter roses, in full bloom along the national bank, are suicide notes.

  * * *

  Write that down.

  * * *

  They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

  * * *

  Are you there? Are you still walking?

  * * *

  They say nothing lasts forever and I’m writing you in the voice of an endangered species.

  * * *

  The truth is I’m worried they will get us before they get us.

  * * *

  Tell me where it hurts. You have my word.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Hartford, I used to wander the streets at night by myself. Sleepless, I’d get dressed, climb through the window—and just walk.

  * * *

  Some nights I would hear an animal shuffling, unseen, behind garbage bags, or the wind unexpectedly strong overhead, a rush of leaves clicking down, the scrape of branches from a maple out of sight. But mostly, there were only my footsteps on the pavement steaming with fresh rain, the scent of decade-old tar, or the dirt on a baseball field under a few stars, the gentle brush of grass on the soles of my Vans on a highway median.

  * * *

  But one night I heard something else.

  * * *

  Through the lightless window of a street-level apartment, a man’s voice in Arabic. I recognized the word Allah. I knew it was a prayer by the tone he used to lift it, as if the tongue was the smallest arm from which a word like that could be offered. I imagined it floating above his head as I sat there on the curb, waiting for the soft clink I knew was coming. I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine, but it didn’t. His voice, it went higher and higher, and my hands, they grew pinker with each inflection. I watched my skin intensify until, at last, I looked up—and it was dawn. It was over. I was blazed in the blood of light.

  * * *

  Salat al-fajr: a prayer before sunrise. “Whoever prays the dawn prayer in congregation,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “it is as if he had prayed the whole night long.”

  * * *

  I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it—perhaps even hold it up
, like a tongue at the end of its word.

  * * *

  —

  First developed as a painkiller for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, OxyContin, along with its generic forms, was soon prescribed for all bodily pain: arthritis, muscle spasms, and migraines.

  * * *

  Trevor was into The Shawshank Redemption and Jolly Ranchers, Call of Duty and his one-eyed border collie, Mandy. Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, “I think I just deep-throated an invisible cock,” and we both cracked up like it wasn’t December and we weren’t under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange. Trevor was a boy who had a name, who wanted to go to community college to study physical therapy. Trevor was alone in his room when he died, surrounded by posters of Led Zeppelin. Trevor was twenty-two. Trevor was.

  * * *

  The official cause of death, I would learn later, was an overdose from heroin laced with fentanyl.

  * * *

  Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.

  * * *

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

  * * *

  You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.”

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. “Why they die themselves like that?” she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know it’s a cliff.”

  * * *

  “Maybe they should have a stop sign then.”

  * * *

  We had many stop signs on our block. They weren’t always there. There was this woman named Marsha down the street. She was overweight and had hair like a rancher’s widow, a kind of mullet cut with thick bangs. She would go door-to-door, hobbling on her bad leg, gathering signatures for a petition to put up stop signs in the neighborhood. She has two boys herself, she told you at the door, and she wants all the kids to be safe when they play.

  * * *

  Her sons were Kevin and Kyle. Kevin, two years older than me, overdosed on heroin. Five years later, Kyle, the younger one, also overdosed. After that Marsha moved to a mobile park in Coventry with her sister. The stop signs remain.

  * * *

  The truth is we don’t have to die if we don’t feel like it.

  * * *

  Just kidding.

  * * *

  —

  Do you remember the morning, after a night of snow, when we found the letters FAG4LIFE scrawled in red spray paint across our front door?

  * * *

  The icicles caught the light and everything looked nice and about to break.

  * * *

  “What does it mean?” you asked, coatless and shivering. “It says ‘Merry Christmas,’ Ma,” I said, pointing. “See? That’s why it’s red. For luck.”

  * * *

  They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.”

  * * *

  The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?

  * * *

  It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be yet another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.

  * * *

  There was a war, the man on TV said, but it’s “lowered” now.

  * * *

  Yay, I think, swallowing my pills.

  * * *

  —

  The truth is my recklessness is body-width.

  * * *

  Once, the anklebone of a blond boy underwater.

  * * *

  There was a greenish light in that line and you saw it.

  * * *

  The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.

  * * *

  —

  I never did heroin because I’m chicken about needles. When I declined his offer to shoot it, Trevor, tightening the cell phone charger around his arm with his teeth, nodded toward my feet. “Looks like you dropped your tampon.” Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself.

  * * *

  Using a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, Purdue sold OxyContin to doctors as a safe, “abuse-resistant” means of managing pain. The company went on to claim that less than one percent of users became addicted, which was a lie. By 2002, prescriptions of OxyContin for noncancer pain increased nearly ten times, with total sales reaching over $3 billion.

  * * *

  What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets?

  * * *

  What if art was not measured?

  * * *

  The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.

  * * *

  The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.

  * * *

  The first time I saw a man naked he seemed forever.

  * * *

  He was my father, undressing after work. I am trying to end the memory. But the thing about forever is you can’t take it back.

  * * *

  Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even.

  * * *

  Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.

  * * *

  —

  I woke to the sound of wings in the room, as if a pigeon had flown through the opened window and was now thrashing against the ceiling. I switched on the lamp. As my eyes adjusted, I saw Trevor sprawled on the floor, his sneaker kicking against the dresser as he rippled under the seizure. We were in his basement. We were in a war. I held his head, foam from his lips spreading down my arm, and screamed for his old man. That night, in the hospital, he lived. It was already the second time.

  * * *

  Horror story: he
aring Trevor’s voice when I close my eyes one night four years after he died.

  * * *