It Chooses You - Miranda July [1]
The movie was about a couple, Sophie and Jason, who are planning to adopt a very old, sick stray cat named Paw Paw. Like a newborn baby, the cat will need around-the-clock care, but for the rest of his life, and he might die in six months or it might take five years. Despite their good intentions, Sophie and Jason are terrified of their looming loss of freedom. So with just one month left before the adoption, they rid their lives of distractions – quitting their jobs and disconnecting the internet – and focus on their dreams. Sophie wants to choreograph a dance, and Jason volunteers for an environmental group, selling trees door-to-door. As the month slips away, Sophie becomes increasingly, humiliatingly paralyzed. In a moment of desperation, she has an affair with a stranger – Marshall, a square, fifty-year-old man who lives in the San Fernando Valley. In his suburban world she doesn’t have to be herself; as long as she stays there, she’ll never have to try (and fail) again. When Sophie leaves him, Jason stops time. He’s stuck at 3:14 a.m. with only the moon to talk to. The rest of the movie is about how they find their souls and come home.
Perhaps because I did not feel very confident when I was writing it, and because I had just gotten married, the movie was turning out to be about faith, mostly about the nightmare of not having it. It was terrifyingly easy to imagine a woman who fails herself, but Jason’s storyline confounded me. I couldn’t figure out his scenes. I knew that in the end of the movie he would realize he was selling trees not because he thought it would help anything – he actually felt it was much too late for that – but because he loved this place, Earth. It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone – it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.
So I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle, the part when Jason’s soliciting brings him in contact with strangers, perhaps even inside their homes, where he has a series of interesting or hilarious or transformative conversations. It was actually easy to write these dialogues; I had sixty different drafts with sixty different tree-selling scenarios, and every single one had seemed truly inspired. Each time, I was convinced I had found the missing piece that completed the story, hilariously, transformatively. Each time, I had chuckled ruefully to myself as I proudly emailed the script to people I respected, thinking, Phew, sometimes it takes a while, but if you just have faith and keep trying, the right thing will come. And each of those emails had been followed by emails written a day, or sometimes even just an hour, later – “Subject: Don’t read the draft I just sent you!! New one coming soon!!”
So now I was past faith. I was lying in the field staring at the ants. I was googling my own name as if the answer to my problem might be secretly encoded in a blog post about how annoying I was. I had never really understood alcohol before, which was something that had alienated me from most people, but now I came home from the little house each day and tried not to talk to my husband before I’d had a thimbleful of wine. I’d been vividly in touch with myself for thirty-five years and now I’d had enough. I discussed alcohol with people as if it were a new kind of tea I’d discovered at Whole Foods: “It tastes yucky but it lowers your anxiety, and it makes you easier to be around – you have to try it!” I also became sullenly domestic. I did the dishes, loudly. I cooked complicated meals, presenting them with resentful despair. Apparently this was all I was capable of