Ocean. (Patreon)

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

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