Little Weirds(16)

Write a note of encouragement to yourself and put it in a drawer that you use a lot. Later in the day, when you go to get a spoon or a sweater, there it will be, looking up at you, saying something like “You are a little sweetheart, aren’t you?” or something like that. It will be good to feel a little embarrassed by the heightened emotion of the note. It will be good to have a treat and a non-gross secret like this note.



Clean a room and tidy it with an air of fairness, like you are doing what is fair for the room. Say something like “There you are, now,” to the room when you are done fussing over it. Sit in the room for at least a few minutes and listen and do that and only that, which is actually hard and different than spacing out. It is hard to sit still and listen to everything you can listen to on purpose.

If there is an animal to hold and soothe or just smooth the fur, do that.

Turn your head to the side and give yourself a little kiss on the shoulder.

Wash your face and hands.

Put on an outfit of all one color.

Only do a little gossip and make sure it doesn’t make any dents in anyone.





I Died: The Sad Songs of My Vagina

Oh, somebody write a letter to someone else, please!

Let them know that I’m dead now because I died.

Before I totally died, I was fatally ill.

Symptoms: I’d started to fall down all of the stairs every time I tried to descend. Something was saying, There’s no point in trying anymore. Just get down to the bottom. Just be a heap.

Also my clothes kept flying off me.

I would be in a store, buying a small wooden animal for my mantel, and suddenly my pants and underpants would rip right off. They would frantically flap away, always in the same direction. My pants and underpants, as if yanked on a line from someone as strong as Poseidon, knocked things off shelves and smashed through the glass in the window of the store and there I would be, revealed as a terminally ill woman with both bare butt and vagina. I would also get stuck with a large bill for the damage to the merchandise and the structure of the store itself.

If it were just a table clock or a vase, we would absorb the cost, especially considering your condition, Ms. Slate, they would explain meekly, as I stood there still holding a wooden fox and choosing to cover my vagina with both hands and fox. My bare butt cheeks were greeting new customers.

We’re a small business and the cost of the window is just more than we can take on.

I totally understand, I would say, with a kind smile that showed an endearing glimpse at my humiliation without making the shopkeeper feel my actual despair or pain. I would still buy whatever thing I was holding, even if it was something that I had just grabbed because it was falling off a shelf.

Other symptoms: My bush turned light pink.

My nipples grew diamonds right in the center of the center.

My vagina started singing only the sad songs from a jukebox in my childhood home, a jukebox that I would listen to as a young girl and then imagine falling in love, a jukebox as big as a refrigerator. It was big. Love seemed big too, like an elephant that you can have if you are good.

My vagina never sang the Andrews Sisters, like it could have. It didn’t even croon out any Perry Como. It was just Jo Stafford “Keep It a Secret” and sometimes it sang “Ghost Town” in a minor key, with a lot of snark. My hair became thousands of strands of fine golden necklaces and they got tangled all of the time and they made little cuts and chafes on the back of my neck, on the soft skin of my back. Little red slits on my delicate shoulder blades.

My disease was rotting me, but more quickly than rot usually happens. That was because I was suffering from supplemental illnesses that came on when my immune system got weak:

Heart-worm, wish-rot, brain-foam, butt-sag.

I had taken to my bed. I was a grand little dame, so young still, such a shame. I was lying in my bed and I was wearing very beautiful pajamas. Oh, isn’t it just too desperately sad?

I was dying of a disease but I was never in a snit about it. I was so nice still, and everyone was coming in to see me. They craned their necks at the door.

“Hi, boo-boo,” said my friends, walking in softly like the floor was made of a thin layer of that sugar glass that they use to break over people’s heads in jokes on TV.

My sheets were crisp. No nail polish, just clean hands. I wasn’t covered in sores, nor was I unsightly because of cracks in the epidermis. I didn’t suddenly have wiry hairs growing out of my face like you sometimes see when it all goes to shit. I didn’t leak. Proximity to death never meant that I compromised my dedication to being chic and elegant.

I was a pro at dying. I bore it with dignity and grace and light jokes. The jokes were clear and weightless. They did not drag anyone into my pain. Nobody got a whiff of anything.

And then the moment was there. I started to formally pass away.

My friends came into the room. I was very accomodating. I took the death rattle wholly into myself, like when you shush people before a play. If you got close it just sounded like someone was jingling nickels and dimes and maybe plastic buttons in a velvet bag, somewhere else.

My friends were all around me. They stood closer than shoulder to shoulder. They smushed into each other. They broke the rules of personal space just to be in my bedroom and say goodbye to me. They bawled. They cried tears the size of dumplings. They felt each other shake.

They looked at my face. My weak little peepers opened up just a bit. I saw that they had broken their own rules for how close to be to other people. I saw that it was possible to do it, to be closer than is allowed. Maybe I never got it for myself, that kind of closeness during which emotion fuses you together and you can only see that there is a separation between you and your beloved if you use a microscope. Maybe I never got it for myself but I did see it for myself. I saw it with my dying eyes.