Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  I died and our dog was still alive, and we’d had at least four dogs. I died and the dog was beside himself and he slept right next to me and would not leave the room and followed them out when they took me away. I died and right before I died I remembered having a snack with you in our creaky old bedroom late in the evening on our wedding night. I remembered feeling shy as the photographer took our picture in the fields beside the party earlier that night. We got married in our own fields. Near our own old house. I remember being afraid of getting a tick. I died and while I was leaving it all and my eyes couldn’t even open I still remembered wearing a white bra the next morning as a new bride while I stood behind you at the sink, brushing my teeth as your new young wife. I died and I was old.

  I died after living with you and never not living with you once I started. I died and behind me there were vacations with you, and before each vacation there was a conversation between us in which I begged you to take a vacation, was bitter toward you for seemingly wanting to work by yourself in a room more than you wanted to take a vacation to the ocean with me. But then we would go and you would always love it and you would always love me and when I died this was the story I knew. There was never another story when I died. There was never a time when we went away from each other and kept living somewhere else. I died and there were times when I had been furious at you, when I had leveled sheets of insults at you, prodded at your identity, been bored, felt abandoned, been mad about your unwashed socks and your problems with authority but I lived through it all and I dug deep, I didn’t give up, and because I held on, I lived through countless pleasures and beauties with you and your brilliant mind, and we did as much as we could and then you died and then soon after that, I died too.

  I died and I never had to know what it was like to live without you except for that very last part, which was heart-killing but natural. I died and I never knew what it was like to not be invited to your birthday party, to have to give you a present a week before or after the actual birthday. I died and I had always given you the present right on time. I’d woken up with you in the new morning of every new year of life that you tried out and carried out. I died having only lost you at the very end, not before.

  I died and I died in a town by the sea. I died and you had already died in the bedroom upstairs, and when you died, the spark of your life flew into me when I watched your breath stop, and the spark did its last energy frizz inside of me and I didn’t tell anyone but half of the lights of myself went off as well. Almost every door in me closed too. Most of the space, where you used to tread, to rest, to read, to sleep, most of that space closed up for good. I became a house with only the porch light on.

  Did you know that when you left me I kept the house of myself dark, that I could not be brave enough to put on a light in case I caught a glimpse of myself, and that I left the windows open and had chills and night animals came in and screeched at me and I didn’t call out for help because you weren’t there? Did you know that when you left my life and I was still there alive, I saw everything through a screen of your atoms?

  I died and I died in the bed that you died in too, honey. I was clean and the last thing I ate was some chicken broth (two sips) and one performative bite of a toast with strawberry jam on it (for our son, so that he could be less scared), even though it burned the inside of my little old mouth. The color of the red burned it, the jam color? Or the sugar burned it? I died and everything about me was a pale blue, which is nice because the colors of your death were tones of cream and white and so we looked great together.

  I died looking out at the grave you had someone make for us. Years before, when we were in our thirties, you’d said that you wanted to have lots of young friends when we were elderly so that we could really be a part of life and know what was happening, and you said that you wanted our grave to be a life-sized bronze sculpture of a tree. I loved you so much when you said it. And before I died and before you died you said a whole parade of other beauties like those little hopes that you described.

  We had crab apple trees on our grass around our house, by the drop-off cliff that went straight down to a small beach and then the Atlantic. One night in a booth in a local bar we were holding our old hands under the table and we were looking across to the faces of our young friends that you had wished for. We laughed because we were not dark-minded people but we told them, “This is odd but it really is serious.” We told them, “We feel shy to say it.” We told them, “We are clearly old and it’s a cumbersome topic but we’d like you to make us some grave art.”

  And our young friends were still for a moment but then one said, “Well, you obviously have something in mind, right?” And then you switched to the tone I’d heard you take in our meetings or your lectures at a university. I realized that after a lifetime of meetings about making our art that we were having a meeting about our final art. I paid close attention to the smoothness of your voice and the way you laughed to let there be air and a break in the tension of making your proposal but you never wavered from what you wanted. I bathed in the pleasure of one last time of you creating something beautiful for us to be in together. I felt proud as you told them the concept for our eternal tree, our final bed.

  The young woman friend looked at me watching you and she did cry. She did. And she hoped for what I had, and what we’d had, what we’d never lost, because that was not part of our story. I died remembering the end of that night, that we’d had pints of beer, just a bit too much, that our friends had driven us home along our old beach road, that they’d noticed our birch trees and rhododendrons and dogwoods, and that the car had been quiet, with open windows. That our young friends loved us, that we scared them a little, that we felt young inside ourselves after making such a wild request, and that we’d looked to each other in that back seat and could have died then from such radical happiness. We whispered, “Should we just collide and burst into atomic dust here in the back seat?”

  We looked old but it was only a sort of drapery that life asked us to hold. We obliged but underneath we were still Orange Soda and Seinfeld TV Show and Ping-Pong. I whispered with my frail old smile, “Smash into me, asshole,” and you said right back, “You wish.”

  I died after I lived my life with you, because that was the story, that was the story that happened and it was the only one and so it is what I knew when I died. Closed loop.

  I died and I have to move on soon, but I will always be so glad for the life I had with you. The fact is that it is incredibly hard to RIP and I’m just not sure I can get it done. Because what will I be now? I know that we will have new life with new forms and that we won’t be able to love each other like we did the last time. Maybe I am going to be a banana and you will be a car. It just won’t work. I know that. And I’m not one to beg for the impossible, especially as a banana, but I can’t seem to stop reacting to the enormity of the final end of us, sweetheart. A death. A bunch of them.

  I died. I died and what was left of you was already there with our bronze tree, an extension of you waiting for me at the airport with flowers. We’d put your remains under its big trunk, in a bronze cast of a small egg. I died and they put my ashes in another egg. My ashes were buried in the earth in a lovely object next to your ashes in a lovely object, and we were treasures at the end of our lives, at the root of our art.

  Dog Paw

  You are not quite awake yet, but the dreaming is done and so is most of your sleeping. You are waiting inside of yourself, waiting to wake up. You are still behind the curtain that separates awake and activity from sleeping and dreaming. You sense that you are waiting to wake up, but you also know that you are asleep. It feels tensionless, like watching a flag wave, like coming closer to a shore after a pleasure sail. You have a feeling like being happy for someone who has achieved an honor.

  It is you.

  You are happy for yourself that you have received the honor of a new day on which to ride. You realize that you love yourself easily in this gravity-free s
pace between the worlds of waking and dreaming.

  You are dear to yourself in the morning and it is the morning now. It is very private to have such a love for yourself. Closer, closer to the curtain. How funny, your face is right right against the curtain now. How funny to know what side of it you are on! You are asleep! How wonderful to pay attention.

  On the other side of the curtain, a small, white elderly dog is moments ahead of you, and he decides, he decides, to come up to where your head is, to where your eyes are closed. He has observed you for over a decade, so he knows where your doors are.

  He knows your hand is a door to your heart.

  He has seen you drag your hand over your eyes to wipe away drops of sorrow, he has seen you place the hand on your heart, or press it against the hand of the ones that you loved. And so, while you feel the gentle rustle of your creature that you keep, you still stay asleep, but now you sleep with the attitude of a person who is about to walk into a surprise party that you are guessing might be there and that you really wanted, because it proves that your friends love you.

  You feel the force of love pulling you into the day and you keep your eyes closed.

  You could maybe float out of the bed. Your palm is open.

  The dog presses a small, dry black paw into your open hand and the curtain between the dreaming and waking worlds blows away and the day is opening to you and you are invited in by one of your dearest companions. And you, you sweetheart, you good creature, one of your dearest companions is this old animal.

  And he has said nothing, just this gesture: Paw to palm, on purpose.

  He has spoken the most important thing, which is “Here we are again in a new day. I want you to see it with me.” And this description above is an example of how you can gaze on yourself with love when nobody is there to do that for you, and how you can make it so that your own loving gaze is truthful and not obsessive or vain. You can wake up like this, be this, and tell yourself that this is an example of how a day can start on Earth.

  Blue Hour

  At the end of the summer, after many returns of waking up in safe, muggy gray mornings by the Atlantic, after a brief trip to New York City during which I get my picture taken a lot, feel both gorgeous and also that there is no place or life for me in that city anymore, after I go back to a Massachusetts so heavy with heat and an orchestral din of nighttime bugs, skunks under the porch, old people coming out of the woodwork to say, “There is a whole group of sisters on the Hurwitz side that you never met because of how your great-grandmother died in the fire,” after my sister gets married in a darling and pure dash of light, I spend two days eating leftovers, feel a heavy heat in my body, and leave.

  But right before I left, it was the wedding.

  I spent the wedding weekend with couples. I was not sorry for myself. I was just fine. I was more disturbed that it seems impossible to me that I will ever find someone for myself after all of this. I am bitter sometimes. I think, “Why should I have to sleep alone? What is wrong with me? What happened to my allure, which in my last decade seemed almost problematic?”

  And during the wedding, I was working on forgetting the past, letting myself only have the buoyant and real glee that was the soul of the event. But it was harder to hang on to my newfound knowledge of contentment with solitude. The jostling and interrupting was occurring. I put my own habit of fretting over myself on hold. I let myself be a drifting wisp in the wedding.

  A young man said, Hello, are you the sister of the bride?

  Yes, I am the older sister but not the oldest sister and I am the middle daughter and I am here by myself. And then the conversation begins but it is very boring.

  The reason I think that it will be hard to meet someone who I am actually interested in is that I cannot stand these preliminary moments when you can’t deeply know each other and be together forever. My ex-husband says to me on the phone, after I tell him that I am lonely and I think I am weird around men, that I am not weird but that I am trying to force an intimacy that needs time to grow. He is right and he knows me very well.

  The other problem is that lots of people are simply not the right fit, but somehow I always make it my fault, even though it is nobody’s fault at all when you don’t fit.

  This man here now is talking to me about something about computers and I just can’t listen well because I don’t like computers. I could never love him. There is no way of getting around it. I can imagine him drinking apple juice and eating graham crackers and having crumbs on his wet mouth, drinking that juice that is the color of pee-pee. Not a good sign.

  He is telling me something that I don’t care about. The next thing that happens is something I care about: My deep-self jumps in to protect me from being bored and starts to tell me something that kind of slides over what he is saying. I make sure to provide a listening face for the talking fellow and then I let myself listen to the voice inside of me.

  My deep-self asks, “Would you like to hear something that is useful to you?”

  Yes. But aren’t I doing the thing that I’m supposed to stop doing? That thing where I am either forcing the intimacy or completely ignoring somebody?

  “You only force intimacy because you have a hungry heart and you have been displaced. It’s a condition of the heart, based on your situation. You are looking for a place in another.”

  I’m tired of looking for a place in another.

  “I know. That’s why I’m here. I found the place where you’re supposed to be. I figured it out. And it leads to all the other places you will ever want to go.”

  Great. This man is still talking about his trip to South America. I think I can hold the listening face a little longer. Can you make it brief?

  “Unlikely! (I’m from you.)”

  Okay, go! I will stick my finger in the cake while this man talks, I guess.

  “Why do you have to stay here pretending to listen to him?”

  Good point. I just walked away from the man, saying that I have to use the bathroom, but of course I am going toward the bar. I’m going to drink wine and watch my grandmothers as they sit or dance.

  “I’d really like your undivided attention. You’ve never given it to me before.”

  I haven’t? Who exactly are you, in me? Are you my date to this wedding?

  “I’m you, you know that, don’t be a smartass just because you are drunk. Maybe now is not the best time.”

  Okay. But I’m glad you’re here. And will you not give up very easily, please?

  “No. I will not give up. I’m here to remind you that there is much more than this one moment of being uncomfortable. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  I woke up the day after the wedding and I was in a state of contentment. I had breakfast in a clean dress, by myself in the hotel. I wasn’t thinking about alone and fine with that versus alone and devastated. I was working on new terms with my deep-self.

  I scanned the newspaper and I said, “Okay, let’s get a new plan together. Do you have thoughts?”

  “Yes. I’ve put together a little list of oaths and goals. If you live by them, you will clear a path to the place for you.”

  Great, let it rip.

  “Okay, first: You will wear all monochromatic outfits.”

  Oh, damn. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

  “You will have hardly any plastic in your house.”

  Yes, I get it. Go on and I won’t interrupt but just know that I. Am. In.

  “I know you are. More now: You will not turn on the TV very much. You will take the houseplants seriously, very seriously, maybe even researching how to fix things like mold or gnats in the soil.

  “You will cook yourself meals and stop doing that thing where you wait until it is the time in the evening when you are both hungry and lonely and end up getting some huge soup delivered and then splatter yourself with it.

  “You will really let the dog know that he is your companion and you are his.”

  Yes. I know you. I just want to interru
pt to say that I forgot you and I’m sorry but I do know you.

  “It’s fine. Listen now: You will be cleaned by your own focus, by not being seduced into self-indulgence. You will become a peaceful authority who says no to that voice that wants to undermine and splash you with the gloop of self-doubt in an effort to stall your emergence.

  “You will tell yourself that good, gentle civility and loving self-discipline are essential.

  “You will not be exhausted anymore by the fight with the misogynist in your psyche. You will remember that the misogynist in your head is peddling propaganda that has been written in your own blood, forged in the fires of your own personal hell. You will admit that this has been a very big problem for you.”

  Oh my goodness.

  “You won’t let the idiots and the assholes get past the front gate of your heart. They can yell from the sidewalk. They can yell terrible things, because they are shut out and can’t stand to be let go, but you will not let them in now.”

  Oh, damn. Yes.

  “Repeat this in your head: There are no odds to beat anymore, just some real junk to dump. You dump your junk. After you dump it, you don’t sort it in your mind. You dump your junk and you walk away. You wear all one color on the outside, swirl with every color on the inside. You walk forward. You keep your head angled up so that you see over the fray. You protect yourself and all the little weirds that make up who you are.”