When I First Started Writing, I Hated Myself For Being So Uncertain, About Images, Clauses, Ideas, Even

“When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

On Losing a House

1. The bumble bees know where their home is. They have memorized every stalk and leaf of the field. They fall from the air at exactly the right place, they crawl under the soft grasses, they enter the darkness humming. 2. Where will we go with our table and chairs, our bed, our nine thousand books, our TV, PC, VCR, our cat who is sixteen years old? Where will we put down our dishes and our blue carpets, where will we put up our rose-colored, rice-paper shades? 3. We never saw such a beautiful house, though it dipped toward the sea, though it shook and creaked, though it said to the rain: come in! and had a ghost— at night she rattled the teacups with her narrow hands, then left the cupboard open— and once she slipped—or maybe it wasn’t a slip— and called to our cat, who ran to the empty room. We only smiled. Unwise! Unwise! 4. O, what is money? O, never in our lives have we thought about money. O, we have only a little money. O, now in our sleep we dream of finding money. But someone else already has money. Money, money, money. Someone else can sign the papers, can turn the key. O dark, O heavy, O mossy money. 5 . Amazing how the rich don’t even hesitate—up go the sloping rooflines, out goes the garden, down goes the crooked, green tree, out goes the old sink, and the little windows, and there you have it—a house like any other—and there goes the ghost, and then another, they glide over the water, away, waving and waving their fog-colored hands. 6. Don’t tell us how to love, don’t tell us how to grieve, or what to grieve for, or how loss shouldn’t sit down like a gray bundle of dust in the deepest pockets of our energy, don’t laugh at our belief that money isn’t everything, don’t tell us how to behave in anger, in longing, in loss, in home- sickness, don’t tell us, dear friends. 7. Goodbye, house. Goodbye, sweet and beautiful house, we shouted, and it shouted back, goodbye to you, and lifted itself down from the town, and set off like a packet of clouds across the harbor’s sandy ring, the tossing bell, the untowned point—and turned lightly, wordlessly, into the keep of the wind where it floats still— where it plunges and rises still on the black and dreamy sea.

When Death Comes

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

“The shadow of a thing doesn’t exist without the original to cast it. A dry bed was still once a river. A bell unrung is still a bell.”

— Jodi Picoult, from The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine, 2020)

“I am thinking of love. Which means in my tongue that I am praying for it to be saved from never knowing me.”

— Paul Guest, closing lines to “A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something,” The Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems (Ecco, 2008)

“There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met [her]. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”

C. S. Lewis, from A Grief Observed (Faber and Faber, 1961)