On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue.

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.

We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.

I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

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.

How his mom, a schoolteacher back in New Delhi, went door-to-door, hobbling on her bloated diabetic feet selling hunting knives for Cutco to make ninety-seven dollars a week—cash.

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

I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living.