All Fours

If 321 was everywhere then every day was Wednesday, and I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed. I had everything I needed in my pockets, a full soul.

“Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” Jordi said, “but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

We must expand now, at this age, and despite all our fears, there is plenty of room, she was saying, psychically. Or at least that’s how I took it.

“That sense that time is running out but you’re too chickenshit to explode your life.”

“Divorce only reinforces the supremacy of marriage!” I complained to Jordi as we drove to the gallery where her headless women would be exhibited; she was worried about the floor plan. “You’re either married or you’re not, it’s a binary. Whereas if marriage is important but not the organizing principle, then it can keep changing, the way the parent

Even if I started a new, more open relationship immediately after the divorce and stayed with that person for fifteen years, it wouldn’t be the same stretch of life. Coming into ourselves as parents and adults—none of that would happen with anyone else. If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holdin

That was his point? I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form.

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 like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untether

I inhaled my fingers, her warm, buttery cunt smell, and kept them under my nose as I walked.