Helia’s Reviews > On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous > Status Update

the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing.

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If,

As if a name can be more than one thing, deep and wide as a night with a truck idling at its edge, and you can step right out of your cage, where I wait for you. Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things—and call it good.

in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question—as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.

A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.

I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you. A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.

From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.

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

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.