No One Belongs Here More Than You

by Miranda July

Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

This is a lot

That’s not true, I yelled. These were the first words I’d spoken out loud in weeks. My heart was pounding like I was asking someone out on a date. You just hold your breath.

Anxiety ; on speaking in public.

Then a strange thing happened. I was looking down at my shoes on the brown linoleum floor and I was thinking about how I bet this floor hadn’t been washed in a million years and I suddenly felt like I was going to die. But instead of dying, I said: I can teach you how to swim.

i felt that. Too often.

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.

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. One question is: do they even have earthquakes in England?

This is so chaotic. Iol

Ask my breasts, my forty-six-year-old breasts. And he would yell into them, muffled: Let me in, let me in! And my stomach, ask my stomach. Let me in, let me in! Get down on your knees, Your Highness, and ask my vagina, that ugly beast. Let me in, let me in, let me in.

i am deceased :D

I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.

I opened my purse and gave him ten dollars and he walked down Effie Street toward certain death and I walked home.

LOL

Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.

Woof :/

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.

Yikes

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.

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.

Same

I rubbed her back, and then I stopped because I thought it might be too familiar, but that felt cold, so I patted her shoulder, which meant I was only touching her a third of the time. The other two thirds, my hand was either traveling toward her or away from her. The longer I patted, the harder it became; I was too aware of the intervals between the pats and couldn’t find a natural rhythm. I felt like I was hitting a conga drum, and then as soon as I thought of this, I had to beat out a little cha-cha-cha, and Theresa began to cry.

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.

What a way to describe a hug

We hoped she was familiar with the work of Anaïs Nin.

I hope so too

I do the exercise where you imagine you are turning into honey. My mind slows down to a rate that would not be considered functional for any other job. I am alive only one out of every four seconds, I register only fifteen minutes out of the hour.

Shelve Exercise for future use

I shook a lantern, and from the hole in the bottom, cockroaches came pouring out. They were crawling

OH MY FUCKING GOD