Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

I was born with the talent for fucking off so majorly. I was born bucking the idea that I should have to be anywhere that I don’t like or talk to people who make me feel dead or trapped.

I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps.

When I wake up in the night, I know what I am scared to see: It is a three-footed deer, staring at me. Its eyes are eyes and then its eyes are grapes.

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?

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 tried the start of a life with someone and it didn’t exactly take, but it didn’t exactly flee, and I had to let it go and be out there and hope some part of it would wander back to me like an animal that went out young and had to live in the wilderness and came back, and whenever it is that it would come back, this life, this love, I had to stare into its face and say, Is it you? And then we would be friends, at peace with the idea of being two creatures who started together but needed different environments.