No One Belongs Here More Than You

by Miranda July

New Men want to have children, they long to give birth, so sometimes when they cry, it is because they can’t do this; there is just nowhere for a baby to come out.

I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.

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.

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.

And then my sister paused to listen to the sound of my breath over the phone. She could hear that I was done, I had come. So she said goodbye and I said goodbye and we hung up. It is this way between us; it has always been this way. She has always taken care of me like this. If I could quietly kill her without anyone knowing, I would.

It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.

He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done.

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.

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.

In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.

was actually just standing there in love. I was not even really standing; if she had walked away suddenly, I would have fallen.

We could not walk past a fancy house without her presuming its owners would want her to live with them if only they knew she was available. She saw herself as a charming street urchin, a pet for wealthy mothers. It was a scam. There was nothing in the world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.

I said bang and let her shoot me, I would win. If I died this way, as Gwen, would the rest of me still go on living?

What would he do? What do the men do with the very talented young women who have finished writing their books? Would he kiss me? Would he invite me to be his daughter or wife or babysitter? Would he send me and my book to the place where the next thing would happen? Would he rub my legs and let me cry? His wife and I waited to find out.

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.

What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.

was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn.

don’t believe in psychology, which says everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don’t.

Ellen turned to me first. It often happens this way, because I am large. Smaller things flow toward larger things, and in the case of oceans and rivers, the smaller thing becomes one with the larger thing.

Can I ask you a personal question? I said, What? And she said, Would you ever touch a woman? I paused in my dusting. This wasn’t a question, it was an answer, and I could only agree.

I stood far away from her, and she stood even farther away from me.

Sue boldly walked across the room and planted her wad of flannel in the middle of the floor like a pink hive or a giant tulip bulb. All the women gathered around it like fire, like fire we knew better than to touch it, but we could not look away.

The directors are looking for people who are willing to do almost anything, but will happily do almost nothing, for hours.