All Fours

by Miranda July

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

campaign. It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey.

This could be the turning point of my life. If I lived to be ninety I was halfway through. Or if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life. I imagined a vision quest–style journey involving a cave, a cliff, a crystal, maybe a labyrinth and a golden ring.

Being only a little famous was a constant lesson in humility. I often chastised myself, saying, Look who’s getting too big for their britches. But no matter how small I made myself I was always too big for them. They must have been very small britches to begin with.

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

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.

As I came down to Earth I wondered if I’d misunderstood the fork in the road Mary had been talking about. I’d thought the two paths were: sex with Davey vs. a life of bitterness and regret But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising

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.

“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.”

It was like we had all agreed to sneak into the haunted house together but once inside, giggling and full of nerves, I looked back and discovered I was alone; everyone else had chickened out. Or else they were all more sensible than me, or well attached. Maybe they were curious about the haunted house but not so curious that they wanted to risk their own home becoming haunted.