'What do we mean when we say survivor?' Ocean Vuong wrote, in 2017. 'Maybe a survivor is nothing but the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.'
I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hanging over the soda machine by the rest rooms, your face darkened by its antlers. In the car, you kept shaking your head.
Autumn. Somewhere over Michigan, a colony of monarch butterflies, numbering more than fifteen thousand, are beginning their yearly migration south. In the span of two months, from September to November, they will move, one wing beat at a time, from southern Canada and the United States to portions of central Mexico, where they will spend the winter.
That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shoutingYou screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutching your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood, confused, my toy Army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV.
The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered. After a while, after the stutters, the false starts, the words warped or locked in your throat, after failure, you slammed the book shut.I can see—it’s gotten me this far, hasn’t it?I fell playing tag.
In the egalitarian, sanitized, temperature-controlled space of the mall, isolated from the context of one’s life, one gets to reinvent one’s past, oneself. And that’s what we did.
The time at Six Flags, when you rode the Superman roller coaster with me because I was too scared to do it alone. How you threw up for hours afterward. How, in my screeching joy, I forgot to sayThe time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty per cent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on the back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging.
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