everything will be ok
- This part right after the title appears:Narrator: Bill dropped his keys on the counter and stood there staring at them. He wondered how many times he had dropped them there before, and how many days of his life were wasted repeating the same tasks and rituals in his apartment over and over again. But then he thought, realistically, this was his life, and the unusual parts were spent doing other things.
- Bill has a few existential thoughts throughout the film: While conversing with his eager but unhelpful neighbor, Bill idly wonders if brains in jars still have bits of memories in them, or if everything disappears once you die. He then wondered if people are nothing but their brains piloting a body.
- About halfway through, Bill goes to the doctor and is told that his current medication doesn't seem to be working, and there shouldn't be a reason he's seeing things that aren't there. After a nightmarish series of sound and images that drown out the narration, it immediately cuts to Bill sitting in silence on the hospital bench, quietly taking his hat off and rubbing his head pensively. Whatever the doctor's diagnosis was, it was not comforting.
- After Bill has a psychotic breakdown, he ends up being taken care of at home by his elderly mother. Things seem pretty fine until one day, his mother goes to clip a loose thread from Bill's shirt with a pair of scissors. Due to his mental illness, Bill sees this as a threat and strikes back at his mother. She just mutters, "How could you think I'd ever want to hurt you?" and faints.
- The ending. After it's decided that Bill wasn't going to die, he's discharged from the hospital and goes back to work a few days later. The film ends on a shot of him watching the rain outside the bus window. He's fine now, but it's clear that Bill's mental health is no better than it was before, and is only going to get worse. The fact that his uncle seemed "vaguely annoyed" by having to fly down to take care of him, plus his mother having to send his casket back "at great expense and inconvenience" makes it all the more tragic how Bill's illness seems to make him a burden on his family.
i am so proud of you
- Watching Bill's mother slowly become more unhinged after the death of Bill's half-brother Randall. She rarely left the house, shaved the cat weekly, and made Bill go to school every day in a heavy coat, for fear of catching "walking pneumonia."
. And in the summers She made him wear a helmet and asbestos safety gloves along with the heavy coat. On his sixth birthday, Bill got a postage stamp, a piece of yarn, and an awkward five-minute hug. It culminates into Bill's stepfather storming out of the house shouting "I just can't handle this god-damned woman", leaving Bill's mother to simply stand there having an anxiety attack. - The Title Drop comes from one of the notes that Bill's mother would leave in his lunchbox as a child. A small, heartwarming gesture that quickly becomes heartbreaking later in the film.
- The death of Bill's mother, who went into a fit of senile hysterics after skipping her medication and getting hit by a train. Bill's reaction is to drop his coffee mug upon hearing the message on his phone.
- To add insult to injury, his mother originally wanted to be buried next to her parents, but due to a clerical error she ended up being buried fifty yards away in a completely different spot next to a rich woman's golden retriever.
- Bill looking through his mother's old photo albums and seeing his own childhood photos. He's reminded about how every cell in the body is eventually replaced over several years, and it makes him depressed, like his past self was "dead" and his "ridiculous, ingrown cells" had stolen this child's happy life and made a complete mess of his own.
- He also finds a journal in which his mother would practice her handwriting, to send him off to school with the best-looking notes.
- The most heartbreaking thing Bill finds, however, is a doctor's note to his mother that "strongly recommended she never had a child". Whatever the circumstances of Bill's birth, knowing all of this, it's clear that Bill's mother truly loved and cared for Bill, and was trying her best to make him feel loved and safe despite everything.
- He also finds a journal in which his mother would practice her handwriting, to send him off to school with the best-looking notes.
- Bill's dream about dying in a hospital bed, and how he's realized the dumb irony in that, by fearing death, he had been awaiting it as well.
- To add to that, in that same dream he's surrounded by family he no longer recognizes, and tries to tell them not to waste their lives fearing death as he did, but in a delerium he just mutters "It smells like dust and moonlight".
- "Bill looks out at the water, and thinks of all the wonderful things he will do with his life."
it's such a beautiful day
- Bill's memory loss is at its worst here, as he starts to forget things over and over, even things he had recently learned. What could easily be seen as funny instead becomes pathetic and terrifying as Bill stumbles through life without any idea of who he is or what's happening.
- After being told he doesn't have long to live, Bill is sent back home where he suffers from amnesia. Three times in a row he steps out of his house and takes a walk around the neighborhood without realizing he's done that already. It's a bit sad at first, but then on the third iteration Bill starts noticing all the little details of life- colors, textures, patterns, smells, etc- in everything from the stars in the sky to the way his paper towels soak up water, and it nearly overwhelms him how much beauty and detail is in the world to the point where he wants to stop people on the street and say "Isn't all of this amazing?". It's too bad it took a terminal illness to make him see all of this.
- At one point, Bill gets into his car and starts driving away for what must be hours or even days with no clear destination in sight. He ends up arriving at a nursing home and asks to visit one of the patients- specifically, his estranged, elderly birth father, whom Bill hasn't seen since he was a little boy. They spent most of the day together, not entirely sure who the other person is due to both of them suffering memory loss. The final bit of narration really makes this scene hit home:Narrator: And when it's time for Bill to leave, he stands and says something beautiful to him:Bill: You are forgiven.note
- While staying at a motel on the way to the nursing home, he lends a pencil to an older man who then has a conversation with his (implicitly) estranged daughter.Narrator: Although it looks like the wind had been knocked out of him, he presents the pencil back to Bill with a little flourish, as though proud no harm had come to it while in his possession.
- While staying at a motel on the way to the nursing home, he lends a pencil to an older man who then has a conversation with his (implicitly) estranged daughter.
- "Do you remember her?"
- Bill dying, with the narrator panicking and going into denial over his death.
- The ending can be interpreted as Bill being in denial of his death and going on a fantasy about being immortal, but realizing that as he becomes immortal he experiences everything so many times that it all loses meaning to him.
