|
b20ad30
|
A teenage Filipino boy walked up to the car and just stood there, the way people do when disaster strikes.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
53f8c31
|
I have to do it to day. It's the first day of the rest of my life. Oh. I had a day like that last week. Really? What happened? I woke up and thought, This is the first day of the rest of my life. Then what happened?
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
6d07bb0
|
Tom looked across the patio, our eyes met, and for a split second I remembered my drunken nineteen-year-old face pressed against his chest at a party, his lips resting on the top of my head, murmuring, You know I wish I could.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
4411de4
|
The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
bc1567e
|
I had a joint once and I didn't feel right for a whole year.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
89d454a
|
He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn't know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
a85113b
|
I was never good at jumping in, letting go of one element and embracing another.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
704526d
|
For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couple and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holding hands.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
66c9eb3
|
But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
1367f74
|
At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can't even feel myself anymore, it's as if I don't exist.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
48861b4
|
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.
|
|
depression
|
Miranda July |
|
faedde8
|
When I said "a lot of work," I moved my hands apart to represent all the work. He stared at the space between my palms and asked if I played the accordion. I could feel the accordion between my hands and how impressed he would be if I said yes."
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
3c45e24
|
Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
f9223c9
|
Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn't representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
bcfe064
|
eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
b388232
|
The receptionist xeroxed my insurance card while explaining that chromotherapy isn't covered by insurance.
|
|
|
miranda july |
|
1bdec62
|
I explained about how we were in Rick's hands and also how he had washed his hands.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
ad88ccf
|
If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have? These exotic revelation bubbled up involuntarily and I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mot..
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
19b9622
|
By now everyone must have realized that this person is not coming back to the picnic. Everyone was wrong; this person is not who they thought this person was. This person plunges underwater and moves her hair around like a sea anemone. This person can stay underwater for an impressively long time but only in a bathtub. This person wonders if there will ever be an Olympic contest for holding your breath under bathwater. If there were such a ..
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
664e2e4
|
And she felt a real sense of loss. Even though she knew she had never had an accent. It was the birthmark, which in its density had lent color even to her voice. She didn't miss the birthmark, but she missed her Norwegian heritage, like learning of new relatives, only to discover they have just died.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
bcd76c4
|
I kept getting older while he stayed young, my tiny husband.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
36b29f7
|
I could see it so clearly, the zygote-shiney and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now dammed with the eternal loneliness of being just one.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
7001898
|
I realize that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
5889583
|
I felt like I wasn't living thoroughly enough -- I was distracted in ways I wouldn't be if I'd been born in 1929.
|
|
distractions
modern-life
mindfulness
|
Miranda July |
|
88e43e0
|
I guess that's true, you really can't complain, can you?
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
b4c1f06
|
We held each other's hands and laughed with feigned embarrassment that gradually took hold and became real.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
843d32e
|
But I knew jumping was like dying, I would have to let go of everything.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
5ac4574
|
Was I like honey thinking it's a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle? -Cheryl
|
|
self-awareness
identity
cheryl
the-first-bad-man
perspective
self
perception
|
Miranda July |
|
9d44b60
|
She looked at me for a long time and then pulled an old envelope out of the trash and drew a pear on it. "This is how your body is shaped. See? Teeny tiny on top and not so tiny on the bottom." Then she explained the illusion created by wearing dark colors on the bottom and bright colors on top. When I see other women with this color combination I check to see if they're a pear too and they always are--two pears can't fool each other."
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
3e0e513
|
Once Carl had called me ginjo, which I thought meant "sister" until he told me it's Japanese for a man, usually an elderly man, who lives in isolation while he keeps the fire burning for the whole village. "In the old myths he burns his clothes and then his bones to keep it going," Carl said. I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described. "Then he has to find something else to keep the fire going so he has ubitsu. Th..
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
5a00c4e
|
The rest of the house was perfectly in order, as it always is, thanks to my system. It doesn't have a name--I just call it my system. Let's say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bat..
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
c6f2b1e
|
What an amazing thing to be asked. Right now, tucked into the warmth of my car with this unanswerable question before me--this might have been my favorite moment of all the lifetimes.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
556c181
|
Fear was for poor people. Maybe this was the happiest I'd ever been.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
805e7c7
|
Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually entwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn't be helped. We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful dog, because that's what I was to myself. Go on, boy, get. I watched myself dutifully trot ahead. Then I lowered my rifle and what actually h..
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
f2039a0
|
Show us life, now
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
7836807
|
C'etait quelqu'un de complexe, avec de nombreuses strates d'emotions qui remontaient a la surface, certaines spirituelles, certaines torturees de maniere plus seculiere, et il brulait d'amour pour moi.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
954b652
|
Ce n'est pas de votre faute.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
b0c7e8a
|
Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until finally it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
73b6912
|
It's okay; I know you want them to look at you. Who? Men. No, I don't. If you do that, then I can't be with you anymore. This was, in a way, the most romantic thing she had ever said to me. It implied that we were living together not because we had grown up together and were the only people we knew, but because of something else. Because we both didn't want men to look at me.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
87e1c97
|
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.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
8102d5f
|
I excused him for the cover and for everything else. For not yet being a New Man. We fell into silence then; he did not ask me any more questions. I was still happy to sit there beside him, but that is only because I have very, very low expectations of most people, and he had now become Most People.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
1253b1e
|
It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
0ce18bc
|
It was still diving, it was still letting go of mammalian pride and embracing gravity.
|
|
|
Miranda July |
|
47b8be0
|
And as I crawl, I realize that this one was the Big One. 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, b..
|
|
morose
|
Miranda July |