It Chooses You by Miranda July Read Free Book Online Page B

And has anyone called about the albums to buy them?
Pam : Yeah, a lot of people, but —
Miranda : But they don’t buy them.
Pam: Yeah. But I can’t throw them out. I used to have one customer in the restaurant, she was like ninety-five years old. Her name was Meg. She was so sweet. She come in every day at eleven o’clock and she eat. And this lady, she’s doing a job kind of like your job, she goes to people and takes pictures and talks to somebody. And then after she’s like sixty-five years old, you know what she does? She takes pictures of herself every day. And she goes home, and she puts them in the scrap album. She was so careful — three rooms like this high, thick, thick with albums. And then one day she passed away. And the son-in-law, he take all the albums and put everything in the dumpster. It’s so sad. That’s why I took these albums, so they wouldn’t get thrown in a dumpster, you know? That’s sad to me.
    At age sixty-five, an age so far past young as to be almost unfeminine, a woman had decided to photograph herself every single day. It was immediately one of my favorite works of art, all the more significant because she wasn’t Sophie Calle or Tracey Emin. She knew no one would clamor for the three rooms’ worth of albums; their value was entirely self-defined. And though of course I wished I had somehow saved the albums, the performance had to end with her dying and the collection being thrown into the dumpster. It was the ending that really made you think.
    I bought a few of Pam’s albums, and when I got home I forced myself to look at the pictures of the couple posing at alumni functions and tourist attractions. The moral of these people was clear to me: if you spend your life endlessly cruising around the world, never stopping to plant children on dry land, then when you die some Greek woman you don’t even know will become the steward of your legacy. And when she wants more room in her house, she sells your legacy in the PennySaver . And no one wants it.
    I’d been waiting for the perfect movie title, but finally I decided to just name it. It had to be short, a very familiar, short word. I looked up the most commonly used nouns. The number one most common noun was time . Which made me feel less alone; everyone else was thinking about it too. Number two was person . Number three was year . Number 320 was future . The Future.
    I didn’t set out planning to write a script about time, but the longer I took to write it and get it made, the more time became a protagonist in my life. At first my boyfriend and I thought we’d get married after our movies were made, but after about six months of trying to get the films financed we thought better of this plan and set a date, come what may. Nothing came, we got married. And then, right around the time I started blindly meeting PennySaver sellers, it began to dawn on me that not only was I now old enough to have a baby, I was almost old enough to be too old to have a baby. Five years left. Which is not very long if an independent movie takes at least one year to finance, one year to make, and throw in a year or two for unforeseen disasters. (And I couldn’t make the movie while pregnant, even if I wanted to, because I was in it.)
    So all my time was spent measuring time. While I listened to strangers and tried to patiently have faith in the unknown, I was also wondering how long this would take, and if any of it really mattered compared to having a baby. Word on the street was that it did not. Nothing mattered compared to having a baby.
    And now that I had vowed to hang out with this man until I died, I also thought a lot about dying. It seemed I had not only married him but also married my eventual death. Before the vows, I might have lived alone, but forever; now I would definitely not be alone and I would definitely die. I had agreed to die, in front of all my family and friends. Brigitte had taken a picture of the very moment: I was smiling