On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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

I have and have had many names. Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield

To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.

Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

We try to preserve life—even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

What Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying “I.”

Mostly, I hate him because he was right.

Pain, however, is no story in itself.

What were we before we were we?

Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.