I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence — I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
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Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.
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To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched — and alive. A name, as thin as air, can also be a shield.
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Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail — or whatever you want to call your god — should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?
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Everything good is always somewhere else.
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Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.
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Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.
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What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place. The way he watched me back there in the field, when we worked briefly, side by side, our arms brushing against each other as the plants racked themselves in a green blur before me, his eyes lingering, then flitting away when I caught them. I was seen — I who had seldom been seen by anyone.
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Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.
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What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?
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Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control. I lower myself.
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I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already inside us.
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Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? 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?
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Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.
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Even when the man stopped, walked over to the dog wagging its tail, and placed the treat in the dog’s open mouth, proving again that it was hunger, only hunger, not music that gave the dog its human skill, I still believed it. That anything could happen.
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Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.
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Into — yes, that’s more like it. As in, Now I’m broken into.
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It's in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do — how they can tell of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
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They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
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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.
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I miss you more than I remember you.
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A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.
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Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the gird is a field — it was always there — where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simple more. As a rule, be more. As a rule, I miss you.
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Take a right on Risley. If you forget me, then you’ve gone too far. Turn back.
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All freedom is relative — you know too well — and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simple the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.
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They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it. But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?
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It's true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.
