from Miranda July’s Kajillionaire
WHAT A GIRL WANTS
I miss the house in August
when it was just me
A cocktail alone, lipstick,
Weeping in the cinema
All the tiny orange mushrooms
along the Emily Dickinson trail
The benevolent ghosts in the living room
The dog in my teacher’s lap,
his sad, content eyes half-shut
Driving past fields at night
I have lived many lives
in a small town
I have lived many lives in libraries
In their basements
Something eternal there
I’m trying this thing where I listen to my body
and my body said go for a drive
The same loop three times over
down main street, past the farm, the synagogue
A woman calls into the talk radio
show and says, can you play a song
for me and my man
“And what do you
love about your man?”
The host’s name is Delilah &
she has a voice that would make
any late night trucker shed a tear
“I love his cooking
and that he cares for me.
He’s a hard worker too.”
A baby laughs in the background
and Delilah says:
“I have a song for you.”
She plays Christina Aguilera’s “What A Girl Wants”
I roll the windows down and sing,
night sky, cornfields, classic
You know the type of moment that's so cliche
it loops around to feeling like something
completely new?
What a girl wants is a threshold, and to step through it
What a girl wants is noise-cancelling headphones,
and a vitamin water, and a long drive, and a small
town, and a library basement, and an Agnes Varda film before bed
One with a lot of voice-over and lonely women
and yearning and color and rain and nighttime
I used to think I couldn’t drive a car,
couldn’t act, couldn’t publish, couldn’t
leave New York.
I did all of that. And still
I find things to pick at, reasons
not to trust — what, myself?
Time?
loved reading this 💌