by Jenny Slate
And then my head just completely disengaged from the rest of me. It fell off and it bonked down onto the floor. I felt it roll slightly away but I didn’t know how far it had gone and that was stressful because I wanted to have some control over my head.
I didn’t want to be rude by kneeling down and feeling around on the floor for the head, because that might make it seem like I was distracted or not listening, and the man was already so strangely angry even though I was the one falling to pieces and everything he was saying was in favor of keeping himself together and also never changing.
Even though everything he was saying was being said to dismantle and delegitimize the humane system I believed in, the one that demands equal rights and good old-fashioned empathy, the one that would strip him of his excessive privileges, the one that celebrates things being various, multi, plural, open, and requires him to explore being truly vulnerable. I wanted him to understand that “being vulnerable” is a different thing for everyone, is a developed and specific skill involving personally specific actions that are terrifying.
But I couldn’t really get a word in edgewise, as they say.
I really did feel concerned about where my head might be and I could feel my blood as it stalled inside of myself. I was taking a breath maybe every three minutes and I started to worry that, you know, this was not going to work out for me, because that’s just not enough. It’s nowhere near the amount of breaths that he was getting to suck in and snort out.
But then again, I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t being attentive, because recently I had let the man in on the terrible secret, which is that many men interrupt and disregard women and do it religiously and don’t even notice that they’re doing it but also gain power by doing it even if they do it without thinking, without what I guess you would call “consideration.” And so now if I ever interrupted the man, he would tell me in my own language how painful it is to be interrupted. He would explain, in a voice that sounded so much like my own, how I am not considerate, even though I am considering a lot.
And yes, that would confuse me, because he would sound just like me, even though he wasn’t me and had never had any of my experiences or experiences even much like my own. I was now in a position of being a hypocrite if I didn’t “honor his experience of my experience.” In an effort to be helpful, I had revealed the terrible secret, and I guess it made the man feel so scared and defensive that all he could do was to appropriate my whole experience as his and then accuse me of starting the problem.
My eyes were still rolled back in my head, which was somewhere on the floor, so I couldn’t see it but I heard him say that he felt “unseen.” It is hard to even describe what it’s like to have someone use your own revelation of suffering as a way to accuse you of being cruel.
And it doesn’t even matter because my head fell off and I’m dead now, but I must say: I really did not start it. No woman started it, by the way. I can say, safely, from the comfort of the great beyond, that Patriarchy and Misogyny are neither the fault nor the invention of women. Get out of here. Get out. Get right out of my life with that and get the hell out of my death with it. Let me rest in peace and quiet.
Where was I? Oh yes yes yes, so then, even though my head was lost on the floor somewhere and the thoughts had spilled out, some of them were trying to jump back up to me. But in general it was a poor showing and the thoughts I got ahold of didn’t seem to really go with each other and I gave up. But just when I was about to surrender to the whole experience and accept that my head had gotten away from me for good, I realized what was happening. I took it seriously, and from my head on the floor I screamed, “I see that you are trying to kill me! I see it!”
And then I saw the whole of the thing that had happened, not just to me but to so many people, and I…Well, honestly, it was so incredibly overwhelming that I just stopped caring about what he thought and I went right ahead and felt around and finally found my head and I cradled my own head in my arms. My face nuzzled into my breasts and my hands stroked my own brow and I comforted myself, in pieces. I looked up past my heart and past my former headspace and into the sky, and my mouth still had a voice and it murmured to my heart, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
And then I died.
And actually I have no idea what he did. He might still be talking, so if you are alive out there, I’d advise you to try to keep your head.
Beach Animals
We were on an Island. The two women arrived by plane, dressed in matching joke outfits that they’d bought in the city where I used to live, where I was born. I thought about how they’d had a discussion somewhere on the other side of the bay and decided to buy these raspberry-colored outfits with their own money. They’d taken off their normal clothes and changed into these new things, not just to please me, but to jostle me with this ridiculous surprise. I saw them and I saw their faces watching my face to see if I liked what they did. I experienced a celebration inside of myself, like I remembered what it was like to win something.
The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago. Seeing them always felt like a reunion even though we didn’t have a before before this. Hearing them say anything, hearing either one of them reveal something specific about herself made me feel downright ecstatic. It is not wrong to say that something was happening. I drove them in the car and we were all exploding.
We all went into the store and got groceries and it was so good that I almost passed out.
We barreled down island roads and screamed in each other’s faces, “I want a man who can say beautiful things. I don’t want to go out with anyone who says my condo instead of my apartment!” One of them referred to a man we know as “a ham sitting in hot ham water and the water is getting cooler and he is just the wet pink pork.” We were on vacation! We looked at our normal lives and at some of the letdowns and we just cut the fat for each other. Nobody in that car needed to worry about a pot of hot ham water. We made that clear and final and we just left it in the dust.
It was the early afternoon and the day had been too chilly for outright swimming, but it had been perfect for being outside. We walked to a small beach. On the beach, we talked about our art and some bad boyfriends and sex and then nice boyfriends and how we felt about horseshoe crabs. I looked at the jellyfish while another woman looked out at the ocean and was so obviously full of her own useful inner combat that it seemed like she could have thrown her head into the sea as some sort of challenge. The third woman was somewhere farther down the cove, squatting over something that had washed up, laughing to herself.
The planet itself saw us. I saw it see us, I think. I think it saw us while we were doing exactly what we wanted, and then it was happy. I watched my friends walk around on the sand. I would look up over the top of my book and see a woman pop up in the water. I would crane my neck to look behind me and one of them would be using an old camera to take a picture of my butt. The three of us were intensely bright in our desire for each other’s adoration and gaze, and in our appetites to be set free as a small roving herd.
I could feel it but I didn’t want to say it out loud because my friends were new friends and they were younger than me—so maybe this freedom and wildness was how they always felt and lived and I was just kind of a repressed dorky square—but either way, I felt us all slip out of and step right over a shroud of rules that often drapes me in a fine chainmail of oh no you don’t.
Whatever usually fundamentally restrains me just evaporated like mist in our good heat.
We didn’t need to have shirts on or any clothes that we didn’t want. A rabbit doesn’t have socks. Why would a woman have a bra if she was making a snack in her natural habitat, which is of course a house by the sea? We put our groceries away in states of undress, we drank beer while making cocktails. We got in the bathtub together an
d sat there like toddlers, like psychic siblings, like little clams. We took a three-hour bath, getting in and out to bring in new treats. Somebody took a nap during the bath. We let the cold go down and kept putting in the warm when we needed it. We kept cups of wine around the tub.
In the night, we slept restlessly but it wasn’t a problem because most of what we were doing in the day was draping ourselves over everything in the world and then drifting off. At night, we put on lipstick and took a pill and rode a taxi for thirty-five minutes into town so that we could chomp lamb chops and caviar in a very old and charming restaurant filled with stiffs and spinsters. We took our picture in front of the fireplace like three lieutenants from an army of dazzling women, here on earth to gallop through your beach house and make you feel crazy, baby!
One night, we roasted a chicken and had our chests bare and we ripped that hot chicken apart with our wicked little hands—we didn’t even wait for plates. We didn’t even think about plates. We were honest-to-god female animals with each other and I felt that, because of how we floored it like that, we could be animals with the other animals, too. I saw it clearly: One woman could go outside and sit on a rock and a fox could come and sit next to her and put its paw on her back the way a buddy does to encourage another buddy or to apologize for losing a temper. They would look at the sunset together, sniff the air, make a plan to meet up later on and howl. I would look out the window while shaking a colander of tomatoes and see her shaking the fox’s paw and saying, “Nice to meet you. I’m Mae,” and I’d watch the fox trotting off and calling out, “See you later for the howl!”
One of us could just drop off the deck, flipping backwards onto the back of an osprey. She would take a flight down the beach and back while the other two of us chopped carrots. “Where’s Jane?” “Oh, she’s on that bird right now—I think I just saw them circle the lighthouse.” “Oh, okay. Do we want white wine with this? If so, we’re going to have to put an ice cube in because I forgot to stick it in the fridge. I’m having beer now anyway. When she’s back from the bird-ride we will ask her to do the potatoes.”
As for me, I would be allowed to kiss a rabbit. Not for a sex need, just for sweetness between two creatures, just to be allowed to be seen as a fellow animal and not a predator, just for touching the untouchable . . . that would be my special delight.
I would see the rabbit on the lawn by the back door and I would put down my vegetable peeler and wipe my hands on my pants. “Hi,” I’d say quite plainly, swinging open the screen door. My feet would go from the steps onto the grass and clover. The rabbit would peek up at me and not be afraid of me at all. I’d have my pants on but absolutely no top and I’d raise the rabbit up and feel its soft stomach and its paws on my chest. Its back feet would press into the top of my breasts as it climbed toward my face but it wouldn’t scratch my skin or put any bugs on me.
The rabbit would smell my chin and it would push a paw into my cheek to try to see what I was. Then I would angle my head down and feel the two hot tufts of air push out from the little nose of the animal. I would blow my own two air tufts and see the fur move on the crown of its head. The rabbit would press its forehead against my mouth for a kiss. I would kiss its little head and press back with my mouth, and then the rabbit would flip its face up and kiss me one small kiss, right on the lips, anointing me into the real animal realm, one paw now pressing into the space between my nose and eye, where tears track sometimes. I would be able to smell the woods on the rabbit and it would smell roses and beer on me.
I would stick my tongue out like when you are trying to catch a snowflake and the rabbit would stick its tongue out too and press the delicate pink petal-tongue into my own tongue, like a stamp. Then eventually when I would speak again, all of the words would pass over my stamped tongue, and whatever I’d say would be marked by the rabbit stamp of acceptance that says, “I am a gentle creature. You can listen to me completely because I am not trying to hurt anything.”
Then the rabbit would make a noise that I have never heard before, and it would kiss my jaw, and it would kiss me right below the ear, and then it would climb onto my shoulder, and pull my necklace with its paw. It would want my necklace so that it could be like me. I would think about it and then take off the necklace with the little J on it, and put it around the rabbit’s torso like a sash. The rabbit would be proud and leap off my shoulder, bounding into the woods to show the other animals what it had.
When I’d come inside, my friends would be sitting on the floor, putting wood in the fireplace. “Who was that?” they’d ask. “It was a rabbit,” I’d say.
We all fell asleep watching a movie in my bed. We cried and ate potato chips. We got more than a glimpse of what we could be if there were no boundaries for us, no world but this. Because of these two women who brought a boatload of love to me on a small island, I eventually stopped wondering thoughts like, “But what if hot ham water could turn into a love potion?”
I started to understand how to move away from near-misses with dead pink meat and into the live animal world, getting wild and gentle kisses from better animals. Instead of asking the old questions that sounded like “What is wrong with me?” I would start asking important questions like “What if I only dreamed gardens, what if I ate carrots because what if I were a pleasant rabbit? What if I got a crown for doing nothing but being who I am, what if even just one plant said hi to me or a tree bashfully bowed as I walked by, what if my dog knew what I meant when I wave to him? What if I could always be a little bit on this island in my mind? What if I could always be a little bit naked, a little bit kissing everything, an unplundered trove of my own love?”
A Prayer
As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.
I Was Born: About to Bust
I was born on the boundary line between cold and hot, at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.
I was born at the time of year when the sun wants to warm the earth but the winter has frozen it almost to the point of permanent frigidity. I was born when living things remember to wake up again. I was born just when you think that birth won’t happen, because it has been cold for so long.
I was born on March 25, at the outermost reaches of winter, between the end of cold and the beginning of thaw that spreads out into warmth and richness that both is inevitable and requires patience.
I was born at exactly the time when anything alive is saying, “LET. ME. BURST! Let me get to the most beautiful and ornamental and essential version of what I can be. Give me space to bloom and present the blossoms to an ecosystem that will drink from my nectar, celebrate my petals, sniff me, pick me, take me home, make your body smell like my lovely scent.” I was born during the moment in the cycle when almost every single live thing is inclined to mate, to grow, to point a snout skyward and sniff the air, to create.
In the very grooves of my being is the desire to bust open, and the certainty that it is right to begin to live again even after long periods of cold and darkness.
I was born a hospital baby in Boston, Massachusetts, at 11:17 AM, and I was choking on the cord that connected me to my mother. I was born and the first thing that happened was that I was made free to live. Then I was loud. Then I never wanted to go to sleep.
I was born and I was a baby and right then, the crocuses were trying to come up and there was still snow.
I grew up a little bit and I tromped through still frozen woods and I would see the little crocuses pushing up and I would be so thrilled to see them, and so achingly worried about their survival, about them being killed, or not having the hardiness to live through the night. It always seemed that the crocuses did not know what was best for them, that they had put their heads up too early, that they were too fragile and wouldn’t admit it, and that they had come up when it was still dangerous.
Are they forcing it? No, somebody always needs to go first. I
know this. I go first.
I was born in the time when crocuses show that they are holy because they are fragile but excited to pop up and they are brave enough to wave the flag of the change of season. There is a recklessness to that thrusting up. I contain that in spades, as they say.
A few weeks after I was born, the apple blossoms exploded with sleeves and sleeves of perfect pinks and there were wild daffodils in the woods, sprouting as trios, and pond-shaped areas of lily-of-the-valley that smelled so good that it would maybe almost hurt me because of how much I wanted them to be there.
The pretty things gathered to live just as I arrived.
We would cut whole apple blossom branches off and bring them inside. Bring that wildness into the house! That billowing fragrance, bring it in on fragile boughs with green inside of them under that thin bark!
I was born and everything in nature seemed like arms reaching out. I was born and the wildness from outside put itself inside of me. That wildness was my first baby spirit food. I sipped it right down before I drank milk from my mother.
These are the events that put their sequence in my bloodstream, and so I am a creature of this realm that rushes up and out, at the start of the spring.
Nice Things to Do for Tipping Yourself Toward Gentleness and Simple Joy
Go for a walk outside.
While you are on the walk, if there is a person with a dog, look at the dog and say, “Hi!” Say hi to the dog first. And then look up at the person and laugh—a small three-bubble laugh—and say, “Hi,” kindly, as if they know that their dog is great and you know it too, as if it’s normal to say hello to the dog before hello to the person, as if it is normal to say hello to a dog at all, as if the person and you understand something together. You don’t have to decide what that thing is. It’s about the feeling and the feeling will most likely be there, and the experience begins and ends with that.