All Fours

by Miranda July

Try to remember this feeling, I say to myself. They are the same people up close as they are from here.

It’s like if someone on the Dodgers wore his uniform to water the lawn. All the neighbors would be like, We get it, dude, you’re on the Dodgers.

I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?

I was busy, too, but I always have time to worry.

or the real me, who has been waiting for the right moment to take over, tap me out.

perpetually at a crucial turning point; everything is forever about to be revealed.

I had just turned forty-five and this trip was my gift to myself. I was going to see plays and art and stay in a nice hotel instead of with friends, which normally would feel like a waste of money, but I’d gotten a surprise check—a whiskey company had licensed a sentence I’d written years ago for a new global print campaign. It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey. Twenty grand.

“Well, in life there are Parkers and there are Drivers,” he began. “Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don’t need applause for every little thing—they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough. This kind of person can do cross-country drives.”

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere.

How painful for both of us, especially given that we were modern, creative types used to living in our dreams of the future. But a baby exists only in the present, the historical, geographic, economic present.

in Malibu again, at a restaurant called Geoffrey’s,

I also don’t love getting in pools, by the way. Sunday nights! Packing for trips! Any transition. Whatever state I’m in I just want to stay in it, if that’s not too much to ask.”

“You’re present—that’s much better! A body-rooted fucker.”

I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours. But how could it be any shorter, given that it was my one chance a week to be myself?

Why behave like a thief? He doesn’t see how each moment can be made terrible if you only try. There can be a problem every second so that life is a sort of low-grade torture. Then, when you are free, like when I was eating dessert with Jordi, it feels really, really good, like a drug high.

One day I really would leave this house, these people, this city, and live a completely different life.

That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like a stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

in this otherworldly place we had only big thoughts, like proper stoners.

Once I mutated (from intrinsically and eternally alone to sucking on another person’s body) our weekly sex felt great,

From what I gather the deathfield is what most people would call depression. Or a combination of panic and depression.

When they had sex like this I’d put on my Walkman and listen to Portishead and try to imagine a time when this would all just be a funny story. Now was that time.

I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.

The only way to become a Driver was to drive.

Why was I speeding away from them when all I ever wanted was to hold them?

Did he know this was the first question he’d asked me?

It’s where I became myself—or at least a self that would last me a very long time.

Who really knows why anyone does anything?

Who made the stars? Why is there life on Earth?

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

little Louis XIV chairs

???

It was the sort of very feminine and decadent thing I’d wanted my whole life; I was so good at knowing what I wanted and then choosing something else at the very last second.

Everyone thinks they’re so securely bound into their lives. Really I had done almost nothing to end up here. I had walked the wrong way around the block and then gone the wrong direction on the freeway.

but most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never brought to light.

I felt very alive, kind of buzzy.

She was doing that thing that women do; begging for what you want by not asking for it.

There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross.

I can never quite explain how the terms of my success are built upon an agreement to carry this person on my back for the rest of my life. There has to be a burden to keep everything in balance.

But there is often one masc-of-center woman or nonbinary person among the faculty hosts and they blink as I tell this story, take a sip of their sober beverage, look at their shoes, and when they look up I meet their eyes with a hot yes.

I tried to let the self-loathing blow past me like a cloud.

I tried to think if this ever really happened or if it was just something I’d wanted for so long that it felt familiar.

Wow, they would say, you have so much faith in your practice. Not really, I would say, and then I would describe this very day, how lost I felt. I knew no one in this town. I had run out of most of my food except for several bags of trail mix, so I just ate that, for every meal.

“I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache,” I said, giving in to knowing more than him. “It’s a problem that you can’t fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second that you have is somehow for it.” You could also apparently lose your calling and wind up wandering around with a guy who worked at Hertz.

But it wasn’t a performance, was it? No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be understood, not made much of, just taken seriously like any honest speech. It was dumb, but anything smarter would miss the point.

The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.

And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible.

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.

Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.

I spent the rest of the afternoon planning the rest of my life. I made lists of the different areas and how I could throw myself into them.

I didn’t think I would repack carefully this time. Probably just throw everything in my suitcase. Also the rest of my life would be a slog and then I would die. Which is the case for many people. It’s no big deal.