After a fifteen-year-old girl makes a bet with her father that after high school she will leave home to never return, her father takes her to the train station early one morning and tells her to leave. When she winds up in Los Angeles, she finds her way there, despite the fact that she does not feel free.

A girl flees her home when her parents want to send her back to her abusive husband.

After their only child dies during his gap year abroad, a woman reflects on her relationship with her husband and comes to understand that they deal with fear and grief in different ways.

A wife leaves her husband in order to ensure his ultimate salvation after they are rejected from the Christian church for their polygamist marriage.

When a young man leaves his home in Kansas City to find a career, he struggles to settle down in one spot. He wanders, impoverished, across the western United States and finds a transcendent understanding of the human condition.

A conversation with his former lover opens a man's eyes to his tendency to flee rather than confront the hopeless reality of his own life.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

A stay-at-home dad with a wife who works in Manhattan attempts to find a sense of control by tenderly disciplining his young son after he puts himself in danger.

A gay man is rejected by his father and thrown out of his home, which forces him to rebuild his life. Years later, the man realizes that his father was indirectly responsible for his success, and that he is surrounded by many deep and loving relationships.

A man who is trying to find his place in the world tries his hand at multiple professions but ultimately settles with painting. Though he has talent as a painter, he leaves his patrons unsatisfied, taking wild artistic liberties he takes with commissions—a lesson which his two closest friends will come to learn when he paints a portrait of one of them.