No One Belongs Here More Than You

by Miranda July

If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to the question. If you don’t know anyone, call the operator and tell him or her.

You are obviously completely happy and fulfilled already, even though we only broke up two weeks ago. I wasn’t even totally sure we were broken up until I saw you with her. You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn’t male or female or young or old; it is just smiling.

The next morning I woke up at six and began walking. I knew I’d never be thin, but I decided to work toward an allover firmness that would feel okay if he touched me in the dark.

Upon seeing him, I would put my head under his shirt and stay there forever.

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 fantasize about starting over and eliminating the film of dragginess that hangs over me. I think I have a handle on it now; there are three main things that make me a drag: I never return phone calls. I am falsely modest. I have a disproportionate amount of guilt about these two things, which makes me unpleasant to be around.

Best of all, every person this person has ever loved is there. Even the ones who got away. They hold this person’s hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can’t believe it, it seemed so real, this person’s heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think.

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.

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.

His harassment relied on a logic so foreign that I felt disoriented, I couldn’t gauge whether it was terrifying or silly, and it was this feeling that told me to go back inside.