but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear.

it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

Shifts in the narrative would occur—the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen.

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

miss you more than I remember you.

Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed.

Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.

person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.