Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

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.

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.

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

have encountered nothing but a flock of flimsy fools, I say, with a bad attitude.

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.

I’m beginning to suspect that I swallowed a rollercoaster and it is lodged between my heart and my stuff.

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?

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.

For a while I would have trench-times when everything felt like blank paper and I couldn’t feel anyone’s heart pointed even in my direction, let alone anyone loving me or wanting me to be around. Very boring, very lonely, very tired, again. It was hard to feel anything, except I am not one of the creatures who will experience anything precious. Trench-times were shallow, heavy, and mean. I couldn’t get into the actual morning because I was stuck underneath the weight of my days.

My chest was laced through with an ever-tightening web of anxiety that was also reaching up into my throat and pressing my mouth down into a frown shape.

You can’t do the thing but then not want to ever discuss it. If you want to hide it, maybe it’s not just because “it is private” but because you know, you really do know, that it is gross.