Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  Or he sees me pay no mind to anyone but myself as I carry my groceries. He sees me being satisfied and self-sufficient. He sees me as myself when nobody is watching, except that he is watching.

  I repeat and repeat the daydream. But now the fantasy person makes no sense, because he is an amalgamation of my different recent loves, who have all been terribly disappointing and irredeemable, which is a big blow to my romantic inclinations, because I do love a comeback.

  But they are not allowed to come back because they have been very bad.

  Now the man is simply too disappointing to even be in a daydream, because daydreams are many things but most substantially they are flares of faith and for me they are wishes that happen through feelings rather than saying “I wish so and so would be here and love me.”

  Now, the man can’t even be wished for. The facts are too firm. The man would have to be someone other than who he is and he is simply and only himself, no matter which one of the men he is.

  I have encountered nothing but a flock of flimsy fools, I say, with a bad attitude.

  So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one.

  I have nobody to serve. I have nobody to please me or to please. I can’t even dream my daydreams, to give to myself, because I have always done them this way, with the materials for the daydream being a certain man. Life has been so discouraging that I have forgotten why and how to fantasize, and I feel weak.

  The structure of what I wish for and the images that usually come together for me to be happy have to change now. But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given? What am I supposed to do with all of this nothing that I see? Those parts of the heart, they really aren’t for me, they are not for my home or my body or my self-love. They are for you, and wherever you are, you are too unknown to be in my daydream. You are on the fringe of my wish for someone to wish for. You are in another country of the heart. You are on the very outskirts of the edge of where my waves hit. You are on a beach on the other side of another world.

  All I can do is believe in the tides, the big drawing in and drawing out that is a type of planet clock. All I can do is let the waves of this whole damn thing flood in and out. If I could remember anything, I would remember my belief that my extra love could just be used on myself. But when I stop feeling pleasure and stop imagining things I also forget my beliefs, the things that float my spirit on this sea.

  When my beliefs float my spirit on the sea, I imagine the depths beneath me and all of the options for life in there. I can feel, with relief, the wideness of the sea. I can remember that things from faraway locations wash up right on your private wedge of sand and present themselves as yours right away. But I have had my heart broken once again, and I am exhausted, and I have forgotten that I can still give to myself. And so I sit here with waves crashing and repeating, and all I can do is wait and hope that eventually my sea will cough up some shell with a shape like a swirl of sound and I will look anew and I will listen better.

  But this afternoon it is this: A day at the beach was never so dull as it is now. Without a person to love, I am too full of what must be let out, and while at least I can use my mind enough to bring out this image of this sea, it feels like life is the beach in the winter. It feels like life is the beach where I used to go with someone who died. It feels almost wrong to be here . . . I feel like I am wearing a bikini and the weather is forty degrees and the sky is that screaming winter white and it is all I can do to just stand still and try to remember why I am here. It is all I can do to not pack up and leave.

  I Want to Look Out a Window

  I want to look out a window at something bright and wide, and at that point accept my nature and understand my intended use and have a clean shirt and clean hands and feel similar to a small planet.

  I want to be in a fine wooden house by the sea and to have a big sweater.

  I want to be a baby fawn on the lawn, to have spots on my coat that remind people of a mousse-y and chilled refrigerator dessert, and also shock onlookers by reminding them of how young things are able to be, so young that they are closer to energy than flesh.

  When people get a glimpse of me I’d like them to feel like it is a good omen.

  I want to have a face with dirt on it. I want to jump on people!

  I’m beginning to suspect that I swallowed a rollercoaster and it is lodged between my heart and my stuff.

  Am I too big or too small or too much or too little?

  I have always known that I would die for love. I think I am dying while or because of waiting for it. I cannot bear how it feels like a surging throng of beats and yells and gasps inside of my small form. I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I’m surprised the top of my head isn’t flat.

  If I planted my pussy in the ground right now it would grow into a tree of flaming swords with a moat of tears around it.

  What is my diagnosis?

  I Died: Valentine’s Day

  Well, I just died.

  What do they say? They say, “That’s that.”

  Yes. That is that.

  I woke up and it was Valentine’s Day and I was lying in my bed and my body was the shape of a melting chair. I was actually just a melting chair with nobody left to sit in it. I was a useless ruined form yelling SIT ON ME PLEASE PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON ME in a worthless pointless voice that sounded like a fart under the covers.

  Sometimes there is something mean living in me and this mean thing gets a sick pleasure from harsh punishment and frightening imagery about who I am or what I should do.

  I experience a lot of difficulties.

  I died that day that I knew was Valentine’s Day and I knew it was Valentine’s Day because it has always been my goal to be in love and to get a proper valentine and to not be lonely but to have someone who loves me so much that they miss me when I’m not there.

  A psychic recently looked right into the eternal cosmos and then returned to me with this elegant yet cryptic message: Grow up.

  I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.

  I died and it was Valentine’s Day and I was saying “I ruined everything,” because that’s what the meanie in me wanted me to say and I had no more strength to stop that sappy speech.

  I was using all of my strength to be a melting chair.

  I stayed there in the shape of the bad chair and I thought about how I used to have a husband and we had a few absolutely A+ Valentine’s Days. But that was not enough. Grow. Up.

  I stayed in the shape of the melting chair and I didn’t protect myself at all. I wasn’t careful while the cruel part of my psyche dealt me these thoughts. I let it get so far that soon the thoughts were not just within me but were the main citizens of my world and they were mobilizing and marching to get me.

  They came up from under the bed, they wrapped my body up, they pushed my eyes in and choked me. I had only a few breaths left and it was enough of a clear emergency, the kind of emergency that can cause an end. I made myself get out of my dead bed and I said, You stop being this chair now!

  But it was too late and when I went to the bathroom to look in the mirror to see if I was very sick or not, I saw dark circles not just a
round my eyes but all around my life and I did think things like If you die, nobody will care for the dog, and other things like You’re not even good at caring for the dog and he’s bored with you and your beauty is gone and you didn’t appreciate it when you had it and you’re still too dumb to even locate when that window of beauty even was.

  Soon my face was just two dark brown circular indents with a fish mouth.

  I thought about how one Valentine’s Day an old bad boyfriend gave me his own old digital camera and stuck it in a sock so that I could unwrap it, and then he went out and bought himself a new camera, and then we broke up a few months later. And you know what? I have been waiting for a good love for a really long time and I have been lying in order to be a part of something for almost forever, and actually it feels better to just give the whole thing a big NO THANK YOU in the form of passing right away.

  I stood on a spot between the bathroom and bedroom and I said to the bossy eternal cosmos, Well, just let me go. Just let me go. I am tired of sinking down to a lower place to be with men. I am tired of throwing a tarp over some of my personality so that the shape of my identity suits some gross man a little better, for whatever shitty things he needs to do in order to keep his boring identity erect and supreme. I have many grievances and no place to set them down, and I am cranky from having to shoulder this burden of reactions, like I am a fucking Ox that should carry your unsellable wares. I am tired of buying my own flowers. I am tired of having to hold my breath through Valentine’s Day the way you do when you drive past a graveyard. I want a valentine from a normal person who is horny. I want a prize for how well I can love. I want to be a prize for love.

  And you know what? I thought it all and it was sour but full of energy and I looked at the dog and said, Will you be my valentine? And just like every other man I’d met so far he couldn’t exactly understand me but he winced at my tone and just like every other man he was ruining my house and so I let the brown circles overtake me because at least when you die it is not your job to hold all of these dark disks for everyone anymore.

  And I took pity on the little dog and gathered him to my chest with my rotten-grocery-store-plum heart and I used my last bit of whatever I had to just make myself die. I turned into the only circle of light and it didn’t even feel great or like liberation and I just floated up and lightly bonked the ceiling and then I sank back down and settled on the floor and I just admitted that I love Valentine’s Day and nobody loves me and I’m horny and nobody is here and I just died.

  The small circle of myself lay there on the floor between the two rooms that are for shitting and sleeping.

  But what is so hard is that even when I die my light still stays on.

  Ghosts

  When my parents moved in to our house in Massachusetts, the house I grew up in, it was filled with the furniture of the dead people who lived there before, and maybe with some of the stuff of the dead lady who lived there before the most recent dead couple. Layers of deaths. They had to clear a lot of things out and away. They had to make it their own. My mother was getting wheezy because of the dusty runner on the stairs, and so she and my father decided to rip it up. When they did this, they discovered a package, or maybe a few packages of letters. They were love letters. They were written to someone who had lived in the house, but they weren’t from the person’s spouse; they were from someone else. An other.

  It’s a little gossipy and scary to tell this story, because my parents knew the descendants of the dead, of the person who had had this extra love. Therefore, they also knew the descendants of the person who knew nothing about their love’s extra love, but walked up and down on the words of that love every day, not knowing that little strips of their partner’s heart were underneath their feet, promised to someone else.

  The letters were written by a man who sailed the seas. He was a sea captain. A male male, maybe stoic and rough, so that he could stand the seas, but still crackable even while craggy, because he had been caught up in this forbidden love. My father took the letters to his office, thinking that he would write about them.

  This is the first step toward seeing a ghost: Discovery followed by meddling. Taking something into your life, something that is clearly a powerful object from another’s life experience. That night, or a few nights later, my mother smelled my father’s pipe smoke. It was late at night and she called out for him to come to bed, but when she turned over, my father was there, snoozing away. So she said, “You left your pipe burning. You’re going to burn down this new old house that we just bought.” But my father said that he hadn’t smoked his pipe that night. My mother then came to the natural conclusion that there was a robber in our house, and that the robber was smoking a pipe while he stole our things.

  My father went out into the hallway, to do what to the robber? I’m not sure. But what happened was this: My father stood there in the hall, smelling that pipe smell, and watched as a sea captain–type person smoked a pipe and climbed the stairs. My father says that he saw the man, but didn’t see him, but saw him. I don’t know what my father said to my mother, but somehow she ended up knowing that he had seen a ghost, which is not great for anyone, especially a couple with a young daughter asleep in her bed.

  My father knew somebody who knew some things about ghosts. This person said the thing that now we all know is true about ghosts: “They have unfinished business. Those letters aren’t any of your business. Burn the letters and the ghost will go away.” And he did. He, my father, burned the letters, and he, the ghost, went away, as far as I know. But sometimes we would smell the smell, and I would wonder why it was coming back at just that moment.

  My mother and sister also saw the form of a woman wander out of the den and ascend toward the light fixture in the hall, but I can’t seem to find any connection to that story except that it is terrifying, and I put it on my list of events that I’m glad I missed.

  But back to the sea captain and his broken heart. I somehow always felt that this was my story as well. Maybe because I was so obsessed with what it would feel like to one day fall in love, to have another person who loved you the most, and loved you so much, voluntarily, that it became involuntary. I thought of what his ghost brain must be saying. Was he sad and mad, saying, “You made me live without you and so I died this way, living without you, looking for you. And now I am quite literally dead on my feet.” I think I am afraid of this happening to me. Taking the risk, believing that love and its people are not predatory, and being a part of the sharing of hearts, only to have to be separated and spend all of my living life waiting for the sharing to really turn into the joining of hearts.

  Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won’t let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love. Did the sea captain pick the love, and now he regrets that choice? Is he stuck walking up a staircase for all eternity, stepping with each step on the words that he sent with all his heart, crushing them under his own invisible foot, feeling his real heart break? Did he choose love and it didn’t take, and now is he stuck in the world without the love, forever?

  I didn’t fall in love until many years after I left the house. Sometimes I would fall in love and it would fall apart, and I would return to the house to catch my breath, still alive, still alive. I don’t know what makes a ghost a ghost and why they seem to be interned in a weird, repetitive, emotionally fueled prison. I spent so much time in my childhood trying to figure out why the ghost was even in our house, considering that during his life he was probably on a big wooden boat most of the time. Maybe he came to our house one afternoon and they had an affair in our house, in one of the bedrooms where we all slept like normal people.

  Maybe he never came to our house, but came there in death, because he followed his letters, essentially following his heart. Maybe he was trying to get his heart back from our house. I get that. I get why he would go back there for his heart. I love the house, and every time I go out into the world and get my heart bust
ed up, I retreat back to the old ghostly house in Milton, hoping to become myself again, and to have one more chance, just one more chance to share my heart, and to share it successfully enough that if I become a ghost one day, there’s at least another ghost right beside me. And I have its heart and it has mine, and we had the world together. This is what I believe can happen to me. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I believe that this can happen to me.

  Color-Spirit

  I am told that I should try to date online. My reaction to this is that I want to walk away so forcefully that I don’t even pause to open the door, I just go through the wall. I will never ever go into the internet to look for anything that I feel that I really need, except for turtlenecks and sheets and candles, and even then I will do that in a very small circle of places that I know have exactly what I want. But I want to fall in love, so I’ll give it an earnest try. Here are a few bios:

  Version 1: Jenny Slate

  Human Woman, Los Angeles, USA, Earth

  About Me:

  Hi!

  I know where the confusion starts, because I am a woman and I do look like one but the real truth is that I am a Color-Spirit. And it says on many documents that I come from here but actually I am a citizen of The World of Shapes. That is where I’m from and The World of Shapes is the place where they speak my mother tongue.

  All day I do my loving, and all of my feelings are colors and they are shapes and they are shapes of colors, when you get really deep into my experience. I am a creature who is classified in the universal records as a Color-Spirit. I watch the light make tones.

  I feel a thing and tell myself what shape it is.

  My physical heart feels so exposed, so shallowly planted. It feels like it is in my mouth. I can’t tell if I’m spitting it out or swallowing it. I can’t tell if I’m going to chomp it to bits just by trying to be here. My physical heart seems to be blasting light out of my mouth but also down into my body. I fear that when the light is shining directly out of my face that nobody will want to or even be able to look at me.