Lifeform Jenny Slate Quotes

All of the people who love me, all of my family who have loved me, have never left me. They gather from their other dimensions, and they make a small family party. They prepare all of the food and they do all of the talking. They are not visiting, they have descended into a place that exists as a perpetual home for anyone in our family ever. We come here to be born, to give birth, to die, and then when we are dead we attend all events. All of my dead relatives proclaim, with their presence here, that we are an unbroken group. And they say, “We have always been loving you and we have never left you.

One by one, I must forgive the shames and cruelties I have slung at myself for choices made at desperate moments, or for spending so long waiting for literally anyone but myself to tell me that I am indeed the creature that I suspect I am.

It seemed cruel to me that we patiently live through periods of anguish and shock when we lose our family members, and we keep facing it, believing that activity and time will settle it all down for us. We make a deal with fate: I'll keep this flame that signifies the one you took. I will let it scorch me in my heart if you let it die down naturally, and eventually there will just be a scar on my heart, and I will always know what I have lost. But by then, I will feel only the emptiness, not the terrible scald. I will let the fire of the loss run its course. This is the debt I will pay so that I can have a more bearable sadness.

I will always be sorry for the ways I terrorized myself and it ran onto you, but I also know that for a while, I really could not do anything but what I was doing. I was limited by injury. You should miss me, because I miss you the second you go through a door, or into a car that I am not in, or across the water, or to sleep. You should miss me, because I remember every kind thing you have done, because I keep a record of how generous you are and I know this record is a compilation of truths. Miss me because of the heights that I scaled to get to you, from the bottom of my confidence, slowly and scarily up, up, up to the top, where reality is.

Yet, the idea that I would go to a man's house, while he is all day all night growing another lifeform inside of his own body, and that I would leave small hot wet bags on his side tables, and in drained cups that get left on the coffee table as if the Great Mystery itself will somehow seize the small hot wet bags at any moment and waft them into infinity, well, that is totally preposterous. It is me, sir, I am the Great Mystery that makes your small hot wet bags invisible. And infinity is a perfect way to describe where the silence of my repeated labors deposits itself, somewhere between the trash can and the sink. And you know who taught me how to clean up after myself and be tidy in other people's burrows? My mother. So it is one to one: one mother blamed, one mother thanked. And what do we have here? A raccoon in a cage, a woman in the house, a lifeform gaining ground inside the woman, two men, and a troublesome accumulation of small hot wet bags that, let's face it, represent a much larger issue that is one hundred percent real, and is compounded by the fact that if you bring it up, everyone feels allowed to dislike you.

I went back to the bedroom and I sat up in bed with my half a cup of coffee, because that is all I was allowed to have per the doctor's orders. I was not allowed to be jacked up on anything anymore, except the operatic intensity that I felt when I tried to imagine a real future in which I had no choice but to erupt a baby from my own vagina or be cut open in an emergency. That jacked me up for sure.

I thought about the houseguest and that I wished that I would not have to ask him about cleaning up his own small hot wet bags, but that I would, because I should learn to tolerate possibly being disliked by someone who does not totally understand me. I cannot make everything perfect but I can work on my side of the problem… To work on your side of the problem is to eradicate the Acceptance of Fakeness, at least for yourself.

But in the waking world, even if your best friend birthed their baby in a bed right next to you, even if you have a partner who would do anything for you and they are holding your hand, they still cannot be your body. And they still cannot be inside of you. Only the lifeform is inside of you, and it has to come out, and there is an essential aloneness in that task that cannot be reconfigured. And this is not necessarily a bad thing even while being a frightening thing, and it must be met, and is living in my dreams, and is also real.

I and these salts and minerals and glowing creatures that are in me, we are flowing down to the lifeform, and we are breaking your head now so that nothing intense or fractured or normally impossible will seem alien to you ever again. The weirdness, the thing that one might say could never occur, it will occur, in a pattern of events that even I, the ancient water who started everything, cannot predict or control. But we are here now to help you get ready for the unknowable, for the most precious endowment and the most confounding changes. Everything must break, everything must split open. What is usually a sign of an emergency has shifted slightly over into a different definition. What will occur lives on the blade-line between total emergency and the life-springing, everyday work of a deity. It will be you who sees it all and is all of it.

In the bar, before the show, I start to get really sad and frightened that I actually cannot do this. It is not stage fright, it is fear of wanting the life that I am starting to possibly get. I want what I have, and I think, What if I actually cannot do this? What if I get what I want and it just overloads me and I malfunction because I am not normal?

They split the couples up and they do it on purpose, which means that they force us, which is a deranged thing to do to people at a party, to force them. That in itself is wrong, Doctor! Hold on for one moment, because I think I have to put the computer down because I can feel that feeling that you have before a piece of the skull caves in and the thoughts shoot out of the brain in a lasso of fire, drawing in whatever offends, drawing in the concept and holding it close so that I can char it and just char it all the way to powder.

But even when I write about how frightened I used to be, I still feel very sensitive about it. I still feel ashamed. And in a way, that is so sad! It is sad that we are able to be so frightened or hurt by other people from before, and then we arrive to whatever is "now" and we flinch because we are still conditioned to anticipate being hurt. And then, that is when we act out. And after that is usually when we become ashamed. It is difficult work to break that cycle.

Something bad will happen to prove that you are not lovable, but because you are not lovable you will not be told the truth about the betrayal. The only use that people can comprehend for you is that you are some sort of anchor, some sort ofdead weight made out of a material that gives people cancer, I bet. And you will be lied to in all of the ways that lies can occur: by omission, to your face, because it is just easier to leave things out, 'for your own good, or on purpose because you deserve it by being such a weak drip. And you will see evidence of how much you truly suck, because when you start sniffing around for lies, you will make people angry, and they will say that nothing is wrong and you are making a fine situation into a bad one, and this is such a waste, and you are a disappointment, and why would a person do something like this?

I spoke on the phone with my best friend as I picked out underwear and bras that were now too small because my stomach and breasts are larger at this point in the pregnancy, and my hips are holding more too, and so I decide to mail my underpants and bras to myself in the future, and I put them in a sack to put in a box in the mail. One of my best qualities is whimsy combined with being sensible and acting on that sensibility right away, on behalf of the whimsy, to help it work. Whimsy cannot whirl itself through cluttered and junked-up spaces. Whimsy is not the same as kookiness and it is the opposite of laziness.