No One Belongs Here More Than You

by Miranda July

One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.

I also try to spend exactly the same amount of time on the patio as they do. That way I know we are each getting our value. Every time I see them out there, I put a little mark on my calendar. The next time the patio is empty, I go sit on it. Then I cross off the mark. Sometimes I lag behind and have to sit out there a lot toward the end of the month to catch up.

I put on Bermuda shorts and sunglasses and suntan oil. Even though it was October, I still felt summery; I had a summery tableau in mind. In truth, though, it was quite windy, and I had to run back for a sweater. A few minutes later, I ran back for pants.

With my meticulous, hands-on coaching method, all dives began with perfect form, poised on my desktop, and ended in a belly flop onto the bed. But that was just for safety. It was still diving, it was still letting go of mammalian pride and embracing gravity. Elizabeth added a rule that we all had to make a noise when we fell. This was a little creative for my taste, but I was open to innovation. I wanted to be the kind of teacher who learned from her students.

If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren’s children would get to him. But they wouldn’t know what to do; they wouldn’t know how to hold him. And he would be dead; he would be replaced by his great-grandson’s beautiful strapping son. His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty, and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for a local nonprofit and spearheading their neighborhood earthquake-preparedness groups. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.

That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it.

As I recovered from the demonstration, he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a leaf that was almost in the shape of a shark. He said it was the best one; he showed me other ones he had collected, all of them more leaf than shark. Mine was the sharkiest. I carried it home in my purse; I put it on the kitchen table; I looked at it before I went to bed. And then in the middle of the night, I got up and pushed it down the garbage disposal. I just don’t have room in my life for such a thing.

He seemed to have all the time in the world for this, my God, did he have time. I have never taken such care with anything. That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I’m being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea, I suck it down as if I’m in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest. Or if I’m in a hot tub with some other people and we’re all looking up at the stars, I’ll be the first to say, It’s so beautiful here. The sooner you say, It’s so beautiful here, the quicker you can say, Wow, I’m getting overheated.

He might even hear my boyfriend’s slight annoyance, his exhaustion after last night’s fight. We both fantasize about other people when we’re having sex, but he likes to tell me who the other people are, and I don’t. Why should I? It’s my own private business. It’s not my fault he gets off on having me know. He likes to report it the second he comes, like a cat presenting the gift of a dead bird. I never asked for it.

This is my number two problem: I am never satisfied with what I have. It goes hand in hand with my number one problem: rushing. Maybe they aren’t so much hand in hand as two hands of the same beast. Maybe they are my hands; I am the beast.

Victor talked to his parents as if they understood him, but I knew they didn’t. He gave them each a purse, the popular SOHO-style shoulder tote in pebbled leather. It didn’t seem like his parents would ever stand again, and shoulder totes really demand standing. Walking, living, needing, caring, toting. It seemed they were so far beyond these things, but I don’t know, my parents died before I was old enough to give them anything.

I could tell this was it. I had wowed their parents with my comfortable silence. Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I will ask myself: Is it worth it? And it just isn’t.

Everything seemed ordinary, even overly ordinary. There was a fly in the room and it buzzed around in a way that told us nothing amazing had ever happened in this place.

You will never be a part of the world. She was standing quite near. Humans make their own worlds in the small area in front of their face. Now she was across the room. Why do you think we are the only animal that kisses? She was near again. Because the area in front of our faces is our most intimate zone. She drew a breath. This is why humans are the only romantic animal! We were quiet and wondering under our napkins. How did she know this? What about dogs? Don’t dogs feel everything we do times one hundred? But we couldn’t see to form a chain of doubt between each other’s eyes. And her voice had a vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious.

I walked down the hall and saw that Theresa was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best to just sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one.

I had made everything just horrible enough to bring Theresa’s sadness down to the next level, and I joined her there. It was a place of overflowing collaborative misery, and we cried together. We could smell each other’s shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen, and I smelled that she didn’t smoke but someone she loved did, and she could feel that I was large but not genetically, not permanently, just until I found my way again. The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breasts exchanged their tired histories, tales of being over- and underutilized, floods and famines and never mind, just go.

We wetted each other’s blouses and pushed our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died, and came to life with a little water. We had loved people we really shouldn’t have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

We held each other’s hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.

We decorated with paper streamers and Chinese lanterns and we shared the ancient bed that came with the studio. This was tremendously thrilling for one of us. One of us had always been in love with the other. One of us lived in a perpetual state of longing. But we’d met when we were children and seemed destined to sleep like children, or like an old couple who had met before the sexual revolution and were too shy to learn the new way.

Her age was hard to determine from our vantage point, a point in our lives when we could not bring older bodies into focus.

Every day she told me everything she was thinking, and I guessed that this was what most girls did together.

We practiced a very loose, sporadic form of class warfare that sanctioned every kind of thievery. There was no person, no business, no library, hospital, or park that had not stolen from us, be it psychically or historically, and thus we were forever trying to regain what was ours.

He said something into the phone, but I didn’t catch it. Despite how close we were, the reception was not very good. Excuse me? Can you take off your clothes? Oh. Okay. From the start, one is trained not to take off your clothes in front of complete strangers. Keeping one’s clothes on is actually the number one rule for civilization. Even a duck or a bear looks civilized when clothed. I pulled down my jean shorts and lifted my shirt over my head. I stood there naked, like a bear or a duck.

Everyone knows that if you paint a human being entirely with house paint he will live, as long as you don’t paint the bottom of his feet. It takes only a little thing like this to kill a person.

Yes, I was flirting with him, not just then but all night. He told me something I still tell myself every day. He said: Men are turned on by women who are taller than them. But now I know better, and I preface the sentence with “in heaven.” In heaven men are turned on by women who are taller than them. And all the dogs that died are alive again.

He stood right in front of me and pinched my arm and said, Can I see your room? Such relief. Even the pinch was good. I understood completely about needing to hurt someone at the same time that you are giving them something. It was wonderful to have an excuse to go home so quickly. As I shut the door behind us, I took a moment to wonder about the law. Laws about showing children your room when you don’t know their names. But I did know the name of his imaginary dog. I felt I could say the name Paul without admitting I knew he wasn’t real. When the judge told me the boy didn’t have a dog, I would act very surprised, disappointed, even hurt. I would cry a little. Perhaps the boy would be sent to jail for lying to me. I looked at his amazing tennis shoes and knew he would be able to handle it. I, on the other hand, have never been able to convincingly wear athletic gear, and prison life would kill me.

I watched him walk across the street to Lam Kien Beauty Salon. He shut the door behind him. I shut my door and listened to the sucking sound. It was the sound of Earth hurtling away from the apartment at a speed too fast to imagine. And as all of creation pulled away in this tornado-like vortex, it laughed—the sarcastic laugh of something that has never had to try.

It doesn’t really feel like driving when you don’t know where you’re going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean.

Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new. It wasn’t like a square dance, where you miraculously end up with your original partner, laughing and feeling giddily relieved to find him after dancing with everyone else in the world. Instead, they swung around and kept on going, some people were at work by now, or halfway to the airport. In fact, driving might be the thing most opposite of dancing. I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself, now that I had finished my book and gone to meet the man who said I had promise a year ago but wasn’t home today.

Basically, what happened was that it fucked me. It did this by entering my body with its whole self. All of the darkness was inside me, and I could feel it glowing, like the volume of music when it shows you how to move. Just the weekend before, I had danced in a sexy way for the first time; my butt and the beat had connected in a way that portended great things in my future. But I didn’t think it would happen so soon, and like this. Later, I realized my dance moves were probably so powerful, they had called it from its corner of the universe. I’m not saying I asked for it, only that there are moments when we are sending signals not just to the boys in the room but to all of creation.

We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren’t killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a real breakthrough in their relationship with themselves.

Some of those women are really good sewers and you wonder, Why are they taking a beginning sewing class? I like to think it’s because they have low self-esteem. They seem totally in control and born to make the rest of us feel clumsy, but inside, they have an almost psychotically warped vision of themselves. At least I am in touch with my skill level.

Interestingly, though, I am not the worst in the class; the tiny Asian woman next to me is. I was sure she would be a really good sewer because most of the clothes in the world are made by Asian women, and also, who’s going to be better at making a kimono, me or someone who is Chinese or Japanese. Boy, did she teach me a thing or two about racial prejudice. Is she even trying to make a kimono-style robe, or does she think we are making dog beds? I used to get incredibly distracted by her; I was just so amazed at her interpretation of the directions.

What happens when you do the exact opposite of everything you are told? How would she know when she was done? And why wasn’t anyone doing anything about this? Should I do something? What should I do? But then one day the teacher came around and told me to rip out my last five seams and I wanted to yell, My seams? At least my seams are for bipeds, what about her last five seams? Right then, as if she was reading my mind, the teacher put her hand on the woman’s shoulder and said, Sue, you are such an artist. And Sue laughed and the teacher laughed and they laughed together. So whatever. Obviously, I don’t know anything about anything.

But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us. She seemed to have room for me; she never turned away in the pauses that allow for turning away. She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling. Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.

She nodded and was completely darling in every way. I’m not talking about lesbianism here, though I don’t object to that, and I suppose I could be seduced if a woman did a particularly slow, skilled striptease in front of me in candlelight with subtle body contact. I’m open to new things, but this wasn’t like that.

She said maybe she was still growing, and we pressed our legs against each other’s legs, and these, too, were radically different sizes, and our curiosity was blossoming like a rose, we wanted to know, we really wanted to know, all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is. We wanted to strike lightning in dark waters, to see, if only for a second, the entire world that lives down there, the ten million species in amazing colors and patterns; show us life, now.

Before he died, my father taught me his finger moves. They were movements for getting a woman off. He said he didn’t know if they’d be of use to me, seeing as how I was a woman myself, but it was all he had in the way of a dowry. I knew what he meant: he meant inheritance, or legacy, not dowry. There were twelve moves in all. He did them on my hand like sign language. They were mostly about speed and pressure in different combinations. There were some flourishes that I never would have thought of. I imagined he’d learned them when he was overseas. A sudden reversal in both speed and direction.

He was incredibly confident. I could not imagine using these movements alone, with such confidence. You’re going to make some woman very, very happy, he said. But I knew I had never made anyone very, very happy, and I could only imagine bringing in my dad when the time came to do this. But he would be dead, and I supposed she would be a lesbian and wouldn’t want him to touch her. I would have to do the finger moves myself.

In general, we try to stay away from things that are MEANINGLESS, and we favor things that are MEANINGFUL. Our top three favorite meaningful things are: Buddhism, eating right, and the internal landscape.

Haircuts are in the same category as trimming the finger- and toenails, which is in the same category as mowing the lawn. We don’t really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors.

We don’t have intercourse anymore. I’m not complaining, it’s my own fault. I lie there beside him and try to send signals to my vagina, but it’s like trying to get cable channels on a TV that doesn’t have cable. My mind requests sex, but my vagina is just waiting for the next time it has to pee. It thinks its whole job in life is to pee.

Other things in this category might be: My unexpressed anger at nothing in particular. and: The feeling that there is a “next level” and I should be on it.

A car went by outside, and we watched blocks of light slide across the ceiling. Carl pushed down on my foot, and I pressed up on his. This is something we did the first time we ever slept together, it is a seven-year-old gesture. We never really had a proper courtship; we met at a potluck where we quickly discovered that we were both recovering from a break-up. By the time we stopped talking about our exes, we’d been together for a year. I pushed up on Carl’s foot, and he pressed down on mine. If the gesture were a person, it’d be in second grade by now. But it is just some movements. Still, I feel closer to him when we do this than at any other time. It is as if our feet are in the perfect, honest, loving relationship, but from the ankles up, we are lost. I push again, but he does not push back; he is asleep.

I learned that my hair would be combined with nine other ponytails to make a single wig. And my gray hairs would be taken out and sold to a commercial wiggery to offset the costs of postage and website maintenance. So in a sense, I was a busy woman. Parts of me were traveling and offsetting and forming lifelong alliances with parts of other women. I felt uplifted and inspired.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being childbirth, this will be a three. A three? Really? Yes. That’s what they say. What other things are a three? Well, five is supposed to be having your jaw reset. So it’s not as bad as that. No. What’s two? Having your foot run over by a car. Wow, so it’s worse than that? But it’s over quickly.

The laser, which had been described as pure white light, was more like a fist slammed against a countertop, and her body was a cup on the counter, jumping with each slam. It turned out three was just a number. It didn’t describe the pain any more than money describes the thing it buys.

She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call “very beautiful except for.” This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them. We mostly want to stare at them like the optical illusion of a vase made out of the silhouette of two people kissing. Now it is a vase . . . now it could only be two people kissing . . . oh, but it is so completely a vase. It is both! Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin.

Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be. Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery. She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.

It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying. Years went by. This thing grew, like a child, microscopically, every day. And since they were a team, and all teams want to win, they continuously adjusted their vision to keep its growth invisible. They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to.