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?

the real me, who has been waiting for the right moment to take over, tap me out. Just please let there be someone who cares enough to watch over me.

whole life will be this single conversation with God.

everything is forever about to be revealed.

Don’t talk about the moon, I remind myself. Ask everyone how their day was.

I try to keep most of myself neatly contained off-site.

Whatever state I’m in I just want to stay in it, if that’s not too much to ask.”

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. So: grit, grit, grit, then: release. Joy.

It was always like this in life. No one ever had the right reaction to anything.

He didn’t question whether any of this was interesting; I supposed all handsome young men enjoyed a minor-celebrity treatment that they were unaware of.

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.

This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. 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. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.

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.

Mostly you put concealer on and then later take it off and nothing life-changing happens in between.

I thought we were going to do this forever. I had entirely forgotten that things end,

I said okay because I didn’t want to be a grasping, clawing sort of person.

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

it seemed to indicate that there was a core self in there; someone was leaving the light on for me should I ever have to retrace my steps and find my way back.

So utterly the same, like a diorama of itself.

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

Part one done of a five-part lunch. The problem wasn’t the lunch, it was what came after, the whole rest of my life.

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.

she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

I was too sad to talk to God or work or do anything but scroll.

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.