Maybe it’s my particular dysfunction and my poor-kid anxiety leading me to find comfort in the videos and in fantasies of whittling my belongings down to what would fit in a few plastic tubs from Walmart and driving out to a harsh landscape to get away from a certain kind of comfort that (I have this fleeting sense) is hurting me. What I know is that the older I get, the more sadness I feel that what the world asks of us is so narrowly defined, and that what religion requires can be, too. I’m missing the friction that should exist between a faithful life and accepted normalcy. Maybe I miss the weirdness of my poor, Jesusy, hippie childhood when my faith felt uncontained. Fern, in her guest quarters at her sister’s house and, later, at a friend’s, feels that the walls are too far apart, the ceiling too high. There is too much space; existence is static; there’s nothing to move toward or push against. She looks longingly out the window at her van. Another way of life is calling. I’m familiar with that sense of being out of place in this world, and though I’ve long left church, a part of me still believes that for people of sincere faith, that discomfort is how it should be.