All Fours

by Miranda July

I hadn’t planned on becoming this rarefied; I had just spent every waking moment trying to get across what life seemed like to me, only allowing undeniable things—the child, a bad case of the flu, hunger and thirst—to take me away from this trying. And apparently time had, meanwhile, been passing—great swaths of it, whole decades.

But, stunningly, I wasn’t at home working and I wouldn’t look it up and I didn’t really want to look anything up, ever again.

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. Working was a romance with life and like all romances always seemed on the verge of ending, was always out of my control.

Our eyes met in the mirror and I could tell she was hoping something good would happen to her tonight, but it probably wouldn’t. Not that she wasn’t cute and there wasn’t someone for everyone, but what were the odds? Mostly you put concealer on and then later take it off and nothing life-changing happens in between.

Which wasn’t his fault—imagine every person who has ever greeted a time traveler upon their return home. There’s no way to ask the right questions, being so filled with a belief in the present. What did the horses smell like? That would be a good question.

I was entirely known and I thought: This is the happiest moment of my life. And with that sentence came tremendous sorrow because nothing was more fleeting than a dance—dance says: joy is only now.

He whispered into my hair that he had to go. I said okay because I didn’t want to be a grasping, clawing sort of person.

Not only the wrong city but the wrong time of day. It would be interesting to see, karmically, how this would come back to me. What lies Sam would tell me down the road to protect their morally questionable secret passions. In case karma worked this way, I shut my eyes and mentally tagged my untruth with a little note: Please be safe, sweetie. That was to Sam, in the future, when they lied to me.

Anything can be a ritual, you just have to name it before it ends.

But I couldn’t even hold that idea in my mind for one second before it was overwhelmed by a new and much more profound thought: Who cares.

I considered saying let’s skip it today, as if I had other things to do or self-control.

Oh, life! Such a trickster! Always teaching you a lesson! I didn’t bother working out what the lesson was.

This was a terrible exchange, but what did it matter. Bullets fired into a body already dead.

“I don’t regret what I did,” she suddenly called out. I was startled; my weeping paused. “If I could go back, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I would do it all exactly the same.”

I had weighted things too heavily in the direction of music and poetry, and my spirit, thusly animated, had come to think of itself as a full person. It did not understand how misshapen it was.

Other people knew how to merge things; I was forever running back and forth between opposites, never in any one place.

The next morning I woke up doubled over, gut-punched. Before even opening my eyes, it was obvious that I had experienced too much joy in the Excelsior. Regular life—my actual life—was completely gray, a colorless, never-ending expanse.

I imagined a heroin addict saying, “I will always treasure the memory of being high. I am grateful for the experience.”

For a moment I longed to be a woman with that kind of concern and a normal, everyday feeling in her chest. Nothing exciting happening but nothing really wrong. I used to have days like that. Did I? Maybe not.

It was sobering to realize there were limits to our cheering on. She would not cheer me off a cliff.

Men gave jewelry when they couldn’t give a song or a dance about their love because they couldn’t sing or dance. But he could.

Maybe Davey was too sad to dance, just as I was too sad to talk to God or work or do anything but scroll.

but my dad and I shared an ability to become untethered from our surroundings, creeped out by the familiar.

“Maybe your work?” Jordi suggested. “What work?” Our eyes met; she looked quietly terrified for me. Obviously a person like me, like us, could only find salvation in her work.

Every day there were opportunities like these. Every day Sam and Harris extended their hands and said, Come in from the cold. But I could not come in.

I cleaned around all our doorknobs with boiled dough made from an early settler’s recipe.

Look up

She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.

“I already feel like I’m different people at different times of the month, depending on where I am in my cycle.”

You really have to know who you are and what is ending so that you can decide what to do when you come to the fork in the road. It’s like pregnancy in that way.”

I sounded like other people, believing sex could save me as opposed to knowing that only my work could save me. What work?

“Imagine what it feels like to be a man. No cycles. No deaths-within-life. No transformation from one kind of person into another.”

Shouldn’t we be normalizing change?”

If you had hormonal constancy, as men did, you might not be taking your cues from your body about when to rest. You would have to build that in: Sunday is the day we don’t work, God’s day. But if what defined the days was you, your biological clock and calendar, then every day might as well be Tuesday. Perhaps you wanted to work for two weeks solid, recording a hit #1 album, and then rest for one whole week, while you were bleeding.

The only honest dance was one that surrendered to this weight without pride: I would die for you and…I will die anyway. You can do that with dance, say things that are inconceivable, inexpressible, just by struggling forward on hands and knees, ass prone.

The moon is shining in the sky above, the singer crooned, are you afraid of—

Look up song

The same was probably true for her; a mutual ex always draws women together like magnets.

It went without saying that she lived alone. Bed-in-the-living-room or marriage—you couldn’t have both.

I stared at a glass rack of essential oils and wondered which one was for what I had.

She said she’d have to look me up and I winced, remembering that some people thought they were enough without reeling off their credentials. Most women, actually. Fame really made you act like a man.

“Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age. Then you have to have lived experiences or you’ll go batty. Which is the normal thing: dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s—all more common in women. Fantasy consumes them until they can’t tell what from what.”

we took everything personally because it was personal.

Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity was my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was.

A person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allowed for it. The past wasn’t my fault; of course I had been using prefab structures—not knowing any better—but now I was older and could see my new path clearly, extending from tonight and ending when I died. I get it, I whispered into the darkness. And thank you, I added, because we hadn’t talked in a while.

While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

I imagined getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn’t discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped. We ran like horses, but we weren’t horses, so after the initial hugs there wasn’t anything to do there in the grass. Everyone started checking their phones to see if their partners were calling and they weren’t. Not yet. We hadn’t been gone long enough. Soon it was just a million women waiting for their mates to call, to be needed, and then to fall into panic and guilt, to be torn, which was our primary state. Start the revolution here, now, in this field? Or drive home and slip back into the fold, use the electric toothbrush, feel grim and trapped? Of course there was no decision to make because we were all already home, not in a field. There was no collective tipping point. Most of us wouldn’t do anything very different, ever. Our yearning and quiet rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate this about us enough to do it a new way. That was how most change happened, not within one lifetime but between generations. If you really wanted to change you had to believe that you were both yourself and your baby; you had to let yourself be completely reborn within one life. Of course the danger was in risking everything, destroying everything, for nothing. As I had done tonight.

“The initial reaction isn’t the eternal reaction.”

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”

“The divine feminine?” suggested Isra, fifty-one. “And yes, she can absolutely run the show. Trust her. Visualize her.”

“You remind me of me before I transitioned,” Isra said. “That sense that time is running out but you’re too chickenshit to explode your life.”

basalt