Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

I was born as a breakfast pastry in the fancy part of France and hours after I was born I was still warm from the heat of the oven. I knew that my warmth and lovely shape were the result of thoughtful and gentle work. Oh please feel it: I am the croissant that felt its own heat and curves and wished to become a woman, and I am that woman from the wish. Let me be your morning treat with your coffee. Disregard the fear that I am too rich to be an ordinary meal. Allow my antique decadence into your morning into your mouth. Pair me with jam. Treasure me for my layers and layers of fragility and richness. Name me after a shape that the moon makes. Have me in a hotel while you are on vacation. Look at me and say, “Oh, I really shouldn’t,” just because you want to have me so very much. 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.

Oh! So she's mother

I know that to be seen is to be taken in. My delight, this inclination to sweep into your eyesight, beats in me like an extra heart.

My vulnerability is natural and permissible and beautiful to me, and it should remind you of your responsibility to behave like a friend to me and the world.

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 was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps.

I was born with a fatal allergy to both subtext and traditional organization techniques and I will tell you I have really had a few near-death experiences. I was born two years ago when one of my friends described me as “the least able-to-be-controlled person that I know,” and I started living right away.

That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.

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

I had braces for seven years, along with a terrible speech impediment and ugly face, accompanied by horniness that had started way before that and also never went away.

doinks

This is her favorite word

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

He sees me as myself when nobody is watching, except that he is watching. I repeat and repeat the daydream.

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.

But I have had my heart broken once again, and I am exhausted, and I have forgotten that I can still give to myself.

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

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 get this 100%

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

All I want to do is disappear deeply into my own thing and you can decide whether or not to join but I’m pretty much going to enter my own vortex.

I died. Oh, god! I did die! Some man was standing right in the middle of the room talking about how he knew that now was the time for men to listen, and he was proud to say that he knew how to listen but strangely he kept talking for so long and I was the one who was listening and so then what happened was that my head twisted around on my neck and faced the wall.

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.

“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!”

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.

When I wake up my body reacts so immediately to a new day that you can hear one high, bright note. I am so tuned to being alive that if you touch me it makes music.

I Died: Bonked

I feel very lonely sometimes, and I felt very lonely when I bought the house. But I walk through the back door into the kitchen and I say to the oranges that they have made me the happiest woman on earth, and I say to however many ghosts might be watching me that I am so glad to be in the house, and I let my loneliness be there too, here in a very old house in a notch in a living hillside, not looking out and down but looking straight into the energetic wildness that drapes itself all over itself and has many mysterious roots that shoot deep into the earth.

When I die, will I turn into a ghost or just be garbage until I am part of a garden?

Patriarchy is not something that was inevitable. It is not what a God wants or ever wanted, even though that has been said by many men. It is also not what Nature intended (and now that must be clearer than ever, because look at what Patriarchy has done to our Planet Earth). Nature does not want to be tortured and raped and murdered. Nature does not want to be wholly exploited. Patriarchy is not ever going to be for Nature’s own good.

Or maybe I will meet and fall in love with an actually good man, I think, as my stomach lurches with curry-fire and my nipples are randomly hard from the amount of spice in my body.

Where there should have simply been an equal distribution of goods and general dedication toward community satisfaction and safety, instead greed came in and took ahold of a few key players. And these key players who were cold enough to look past questions of whether or not what they were doing was humane were Men.

The Code of Hammurabi is one of the first examples of legalized patriarchy, and it instilled these violent and demented ideals: A woman is the property of a man. A woman does not deserve to have as much as a man and she should not ever have as much as a man ever again. It says that in order for the men to thrive, women must be kept in line and controlled. It says, This starts now. It says women are worth something great to us, and because of that we must say that they are less than us, and we must never let them know what it is about them that we are trying to take for ourselves. It says, Women can’t. They must not. It says, Women are property. Men decide what women can do with their bodies. Men own women. We are all separate and must stay divided. Women are beneath, less than, but also, watch out for them, really do watch out! But act like you are not “watching out” or scared—act like a good guy who is protecting the holy object.