Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

There are so many times when I want to be here just for your consumption, just to satisfy your appetite. This is what I feel I am intended for—I can’t help it. An intention was inside of me already when I traveled from infinity to a kitchen with a windowsill, to a wish, to a woman.

What is this spirit in me saying “Up! Up! UP!”? Up for a better view, for a better location to be viewed. Get me to a better place so that I can see more and also be spotted by the kind of people who turn their faces up to the light. Put me in between them and the cosmos, let me be one final stop before the major everything.

I am nervous but also excited for you to see my onstage outfit chosen just for you and the people. It took many tries to choose this one outfit. I was trying to figure out what I want to be wearing when we all fall in love.

I’m setting the tone and the tone is this: There is a free, wild creature up here, and now you must think about how to take her in and keep her alive. This is the tone that is rippling through the pages up ahead.

Look! Look at this woman who is both the emergency and the relief. Let me be both (I have no choice). Give in. Fall apart. Look at the pieces. Reassemble. This is the essential movement of my holy flux.

I was born into a world where many men want to oppress all of the women with violence and laws and you or I can’t say anything else anymore without also admitting that.

I told my mother that the flower she showed me was a honeysuckle. I knew from the little conical, trumpet-shaped blooms. She nodded and we both knew that we knew. She picked a flower off and smelled it. Then she gave it to me to smell, and I sniffed in its honey-floral petal cone. It smelled like a fancy candy, and even though I’d smelled honeysuckle before, its scent pleasure-stung me anew, and I laughed a bit and said, “Unbelievable.” She knew I was talking about the gentle shock you can feel about how straightforward nature is in its generosity, its dizzyingly intricate offerings.

“The more you give, the more you have, the more new things you are a part of, the more you are truly alive.”

He thinks in layers when he thinks about how he loves me.

I want a prize for how well I can love. I want to be a prize for love.

I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

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.

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.

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.

Write a letter to someone. Tell them that this is not a tragedy. The rest of me went home to the universe.

I tried to write down how I felt. I recently found the note I wrote to myself, and all it said was “I’m too overwhelmed to say any more and I’m too scared to say any more and I feel too foolish, but I must not forget this, so I’m writing this down and this is the best that I can do.”

In the forest, everything that is inclined to thrive really does, and has a job, and some jobs are to grow things up and some jobs are to take things apart and everything is accepted because there is no notion—among bacteria and moss and busy mice—there is no notion of who deserves to do something or be in a place. There are only lives to be lived, and they are everywhere.