Miranda July Turns the Lights On

I was entirely known and I thought: This is the happiest moment of my life. And with that sentence came tremendous sorrow because nothing was more fleeting than a dance—dance says: joy is only now.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do that,” Jordi said. “Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn’t have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn’t we be normalizing change?”

I’m not a household name. I won’t go into the tedious specifics of what I do, but picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age and has continued very steadily, always circling her central concerns in a sort of ecstatic fugue state with the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path—her whole life will be this sin

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