All Fours

by Miranda July

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

That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like a stranger.

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

If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. 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.

So I gave up on everything but now. Every opinion and judgment I had ever had, my entire past including my child and husband and parents, my future, my career, my eventual death—I let all of it go.

I wasn’t dead, but I was too much a soul. 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.

So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth.

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.

She was leaving? I couldn’t believe it. But then I never can.