All Fours

by Miranda July

I was quiet now, bludgeoned by this vision of intimacy. It wasn’t a matter of having lost at this conversation; I had lost at life.

I came into the house my usual way, 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.

The Benadryl was for sleep, not allergies. I’d been having this thing where I woke up every night at two a.m. It wasn’t a big deal unless I didn’t have Benadryl and then it was a harrowing fugue state ending only when the sun rose on a fragile, weeping shell of a person, unable to work or think, much less drive safely. That’s why I needed extra.

He was sliding the rubber edge across the glass with long, sure, steady strokes. It was hypnotic, like being bathed. I fell into a sort of lazy trance and for this reason I was slow to realize we had made eye contact. How embarrassing. But to look away would make it seem as if I cared what this person thought—he should look away. He didn’t, so we remained locked together like this as he made his way down the window. In moments he seemed to be smiling faintly at our predicament and at other times he grew deeply serious, as if this thing between us was no joke. And I could feel my own face mirroring his, sunny and then somber, grave. I felt a little disoriented. What had I gotten myself into? Would this never end?

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires. I knew many women (like my own dear Jordi) who simply couldn’t handle the feeling lying gave them—it wasn’t their bag.

Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly.

The women I had dated were often my age, that was fine. But the men always had to be older than me because if they were my same age then it became too obvious how much more powerful I was and this was a turnoff for both of us. Men needed a head start for it to be even.

I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it,

“Well, it would be if I didn’t drug myself with three Benadryls every night.” “Wait, you take those every night?” “Otherwise I wake up at two a.m. and am a total wreck the next day. Let’s talk about this later.” “But is that healthy? To do that for years? I’m looking it up.” “I think it’s okay. It’s over-the-counter.” “…significantly higher risk of developing dementia,” she read. This wasn’t great news, given my mom’s mild cognitive impairment, but dementia was the least of my problems right now.

Exercise-wise I’d never done more than buy ten yoga classes and take two of them. I was so weak that sometimes my arm got tired brushing my teeth. I nodded instead of waving—hands are heavy! No one wants to admit it! And heads. Just keeping the whole contraption upright was a lot. I was almost always leaning on something, sharing the burden with a counter or a doorway. There was nothing really wrong with me, exercise just seemed like a lot of investment in a temporary body.

Wasn’t this basically what Hell was? People forced to endlessly lift and lower heavy things for no reason?

I was suddenly united with a long lineage of women who fixed everything through food; terror can really strip you of your modernity.

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