No One Belongs Here More Than You

by Miranda July

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 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.

I didn’t want the man on the stairs knowing these things about us. But he would know. The second he threw on the lights and pulled out his gun, or his knife, or his heavy rock, the second he held the gun to my head, or the knife at my heart, or the heavy rock over my chest, he would know. He would see it in my boyfriend’s eyes: You can have her, just let me live. And in my eyes, he would see the words: I never really knew true love. Would he empathize with us? Does he know what it’s like? Most people do. You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it’s not true. Generally, people don’t like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends. They are people with jobs in their fields of interest.

We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired—as furniture sanders—we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone’s job.

I thought maybe I would swing by Madeleine’s house and see if his car was out front. It was either this or begin a career as something other than a writer. If I thought of another career before I got to the house, I would turn around and pursue that. I made the car go slowly so that everyone could see it was thinking. It was considering careers for me. I looked out the windows and tried to see who the pedestrians thought I was when they looked at my car. But they didn’t look at my car; they looked inward. They considered themselves and their own cars; they made love with their hurrying. They took each step as if it would not be their last, and it wasn’t. They did not look up and stare into my headlights and whisper, “special-needs assistant,” and thus, when I rounded the corner of Madeleine’s block, I was still planning on being a writer.

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. I am a really bad sewer. 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.

Accountants do this all the time, and so do Indian restaurants. Sag paneer? Very good choice. The waiter hands the order to the cook, the cook hands it to the busboy, the busboy runs down the block and orders sag paneer from the other Indian restaurant, the shoddy one, takeout. This is why the more expensive restaurants take longer to bring out the food.

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.

I do this before I bring someone new into my life; I try to get a sense of who I am so that I can make it easier for them to know me.

When my husband saw the new short hair, he gave me the look we give each other when one of us forgets who we are. We are not people who buy instant cocoa powder, we do not make small talk, we do not buy Hallmark cards or believe in Hallmark rituals such as Valentine’s Day or weddings. 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.

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.

Instantcast.com explained that your willingness to hit redial for hours at a time is the screening process. This is the actual, professional way that one applies for this job, in the manner of a person trying to win tickets off the radio. The directors are looking for people who are willing to do almost anything, but will happily do almost nothing, for hours.

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.

Inelegantly and without my consent, time passed.