Ocean. (Patreon)
Content
Pull quote.
….
The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, "I'm not a monster. I'm a mother."
What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.
The morning closed in around us.
I put down the book. The heads of the green beans went on snapping. They thunked in the steel sink like fingers. "You're not a monster," I said.
But I lied.
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
….
-Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”
Sending love from a needed respite.
Xx
Afp