All Fours

by Miranda July

The problem began right at the start, with one of us entirely inside the other, a state that seemed close but was fundamentally distant. I couldn’t even press my ear up against my own pregnant belly to hear them, only other people could.

Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth.

Also, she was used to my crushes. I almost regretted how much I had told her over the years; it made it harder to convey how this one was different.

I was trying to explain what my work meant to me. How life, usually so frustratingly scattered and elusive, came under my spell; I could name each thing, no matter how obscure, and it would open to me as if it loved me.