It Chooses You Read Online Free PDF Page B

mean, if you had the choice.
Andrew: I don’t know, because people say it’s hard. And I’m not really good with all that stuff. When I want to do something I want to know that I can accomplish it, but if I start thinking that in the long run it’s going to be super hard, I kind of take a step back.
Miranda: Well, especially if you’ve had people telling you that you’re not good at that, it’s a hard thing to learn to finish. At least you’re almost an adult — there are some good things about that. In high school you don’t have any real rights, but at least in college…
Andrew: Yeah. It’s all on me now.
    It was tempting to jump in with some advice — I was about two seconds away from offering him an internship at my brother’s workplace, restoring wetlands. But it seemed be a tendency of mine to look for each person’s problem and then overlook all the other things about them. So I tried to see what else he was, besides lost in the system. Andrew was a little angry, but more than that, he was proud. So I changed my approach; I said the opposite of what I felt, and it was more true.
Miranda: So we caught you at a kind of exciting time in your life.
Andrew: Yeah, pretty much at a good time.
Miranda: This is corny, but you’re kind of like the tadpole about to transform.



Andrew: Yeah. It’s true.
Miranda: You’re one of the big ones that have only a couple weeks left.
Andrew: You could say that, a tadpole.
    For a moment I could feel time the way he felt it — it was endless. It didn’t really matter that his dreams of wildlife were in the opposite direction from the airplane hangar where he was headed, because there was time for multiple lives. Everything could still happen, so no decision could be very wrong.
    That was exactly the opposite of how I was feeling now, at thirty-five. I drove home from Paramount feeling ancient, like the characters in my script
Sophie: We’ll be forty in five years.
Jason: Forty is almost fifty, and after fifty the rest is just loose change.
Sophie: Loose change?
Jason: Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.
    I knew this wasn’t really true, but that was the paralyzing sensation. There wasn’t time to make mistakes anymore, or to do things without knowing why. And each thing I made had to be more impossibly challenging than the last, which was hair-raising, since I had been out of my depths from the very start.
    The first thing I ever made professionally — that is, for the ostensible public — was a play about my correspondence with a man in prison. I started writing to Franko C. Jones when I was fourteen. I’d found his address in (where else?) the classifieds, in a section that doesn’t seem to exist anymore called “Prison Pen Pals.” When I was younger, my dad had read The Minds of Billy Milligan to me before bed, the true story of a robber and rapist with multiple personality disorder (my father’s preference was to read me books that he himself was interested in). So my sympathy for imprisoned men was sort of a family tradition; I may even have written my first letter to Franko because I wanted to do something my dad would think was interesting. But then I kept writing to him for three years, every week.
    The gap between a thirty-eight-year-old murderer serving his eighteenth year in Florence, Arizona, and a sixteen-year-old prep-school student in Berkeley, California, is lyrical in scale, like the size of the ocean or outer space. Bridging it seemed like one of the few things I could do that might be holy or transcendent. I’ve been trying for so long now, for decades, to lift the lid a little bit, to see under the edge of life and somehow catch it in the act —“it” being not God (because the word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder) but something along those lines. We wrote about grades, prison riots (Franko tape-recorded the sounds of one), my friends (Johanna, Jenni), his friends (Lefty,