McKenzie

“It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “it’s been an honor to serve my country.”

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. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?
It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: you don’t have to be like the buffaloes.
You can stop.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“And of all the things on my mind this evening,
words weigh the least,
Death weighs the most,
and your voice's body
beneath my voice's moving hand
is a green agent of freedom and order,
best friend to my earth and my ache.

Of all the things keeping me from sleep,
words weigh too much, yet not enough.
Time weighs nothing at all,
but I can't bear it.
And your body, burdened by minutes
and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song.

One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee,
your body is the Lord's pure geometry.
Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies,
and the mouth of the falls.

And of all the things we're dying from tonight,
being alive is the strangest.
Surviving our histories is the saddest.
Time leaves the smallest wounds,
and your body, a mortal occasion
of timeless law,
is all the word I know.”
― Li-Young Lee, The Undressing: Poems