it was always October / in my throat.
“In this culture, we celebrate boys through the lexicon of violence – ‘you’re killin’ it,’ ‘you’re making a killin’,’ ‘smash ‘em,’ ‘blow ‘em up,’ ‘you went into that game guns blazing.’ And I think it’s worth it to ask the question: what happens to our men and boys when the only way they can valuate themselves is through the lexicon of death and destruction? And I think when they see themselves only worthwhile when they are capable of destroying things, it’s inevitable that we arrive at a masculinity that is toxic.” - Ocean Vuong
Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
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.
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.
- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel (Penguin Press, June 4, 2019)
“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but rather, that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.“
destroymylife