In 2017 a friend will ask if you would like to accompany
her to hear Ocean Vuong read from “Night Sky with Exit
Wounds” at Local 61 on Bergen Street. But she isn’t your
friend. Not yet. Nights earlier the two of you went on a
date, or you thought it was a date until your second beer
when this not-yet-friend tells you she has a “forever
roommate” and shows you the ring on her third finger to
prove it, so when she invites you out you hesitate but go,
and there your not-yet-friend introduces you to a woman
who is long and beautiful, and you try to ignore her, but the
woman who is long and beautiful comes on to you, and the
next day the two of you take a walk through Central Park
and give praise to the daffodils and pick a movie to see
without care just to find somewhere dark to kiss each
other’s cheeks, and you fall in love, and you and the
woman who is long and beautiful and your not-yet-friend
and her forever roommate spend the summer at Rockaway
Beach, and after five months the woman who is long and
beautiful will leave a paper bag of all that you gave her
under a picnic bench at Cobble Hill Park, and she’ll hold
your hand and tell you that it’s over, but a year later you’ll
share one final kiss outside of Congress Bar on Court Street
just to wish each other well, and that will be the end of that.
Except that through it all your not-yet-friend and her
forever roommate have become two you could not do
without. One broken romance has given birth to two fast
friendships, and now you know who Ocean Vuong is too.
In 2019 another friend will ask if you would like to
accompany her to hear Ocean Vuong read from “On Earth
We’re Briefly Gorgeous” at Books Are Magic on Smith
Street. She is a friend even though you used to ask her out
frequently, and you thought you might even be in love, and
you write her bad love poems drunk at three in the
morning, and after she acquiesces to one afternoon date
walking through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and
admiring the bonsai trees and sharing a small lunch on
Lincoln Place she falls for someone else, and you decide to
let it go, and time moves on, and you have instead learned
to love without having to have.
In 2013 you are in the Community Bookstore on the corner
of Warren Street, and you are in love, so much so that you
decide to become a poet, and you bounce between
Bukowski and Baudelaire looking for a roadmap, but the
love you call a Tiger in every line you write shows you that
Lisel Mueller has what soothes the soul, and the two of you
eat acid at the Museum of Natural History and marvel at
the life of blue whales, and you come down in their dad’s
basement on Douglass Street, and the Tiger calls you an
artist, and you are in love, and the last time you make love
is in the bathroom at Brooklyn Social across the street from
Carroll Park, but you don’t know it’s the last time, and
friendship is a thing far away, and you don’t know who
Ocean Vuong is either.
In 2023 I ask you to accompany me to hear Ocean Vuong
read from “A Little Closer to the Edge” at 100 Bogart
Street in Bushwick. Your not-yet-friend and her forever
roommate have moved to Texas, and the friend you love
without having to have has gone back to Connecticut, and
the tiger who called you an artist is in the wilds of Los
Angeles, and the woman who is long and beautiful is
beyond your sight, but I am here with you, and friendships
last and are good, and heartbreaks last and are good too,
and maybe poetry is better than both but probably not, and
Cobble Hill is just a place, and I am here with you, and you
know who Ocean Vuong is too.
