All Fours

by Miranda July

I hoped this was happening and had been happening since my birth, or something along these lines. If not this man through the windows, then God, or my parents, or my real parents, who are actually just my parents, or 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.

because I was busy savoring my position, like when a crush finally texts back and you want to enjoy having the ball in your court for a while.

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

It’s some kind of Greek tragedy, us, but not all told.

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. With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism—money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head. On the other hand, sometimes it’s good when things come to a head. And then eventually, one day: pop.

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.

I was so good at knowing what I wanted and then choosing something else at the very last second.

Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly. These “free spirits” who thought they could just invent the value of things.

You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.

I was speaking now to all my friends and family: You have all missed the point of me.

Because we were all witches until very recently. We were cast out and burned at the stake only three hundred years ago. That’s nothing. No time at all.

Maybe. Or maybe I was like a person on vacation in Hawaii who gets the dumb idea that they should move to Hawaii so they can feel like they’re on vacation all the time.

What you wanted to do in your dream was not die but fly—levitate—and hope that the ability carried through to the next day.

One should always be asking themselves What if I lost this? How much would it matter?

I was pretty good at getting people to meet me in my mind, but ultimately no one wanted to stay there.

This too shall end is what I told myself.