Every Day (Every Day, #1)

by David Levithan

Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It’s not just the body—opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I’m fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you’re used to waking up in a new one each morning.

It’s the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp. Every day I am someone else. I am myself—I know I am myself—but I am also someone else. It has always been like this.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned how to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present, because that is where I am destined to live.

What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity?

There’s always a chance that his life will in fact change—that he will change. But I have no way of knowing. It’s rare that I get to see a body after I’ve left it. And even then, it’s usually months or years later. If I recognize it at all.

I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.

Once you experience enormity, it lingers

everywhere you look, and wants to be every word you say.

There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs, dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.

I try to go back to sleep, but the body won’t let me. The body is awake now, and it knows what it wants.

I don’t want to leave the room. If I leave the room, anything and anyone can happen. Desperately, I look around for something to help me through. There is a decrepit bookshelf, and on it is a selection of old paperbacks. These will save me, I decide. I open up an old thriller and focus on the first line. Darkness had descended on Manassas, Virginia.…

The body does not want to read. The body is alive with electric barbed wire. The body is telling me there is only one way to fix this, only one way to end the pain, only one way to feel better.

I am not sure I have the strength to resist this.

I must remain separate from this.

It’s not working. The body makes me feel like it wants to defecate and

vomit.

The body is infecting me. I am getting angry. Angry that I am here. Angry that this is my life.

The fight is exhausting the body. I am winning.

It is a mistake to think of the body as a vessel. It is as active as any mind, as any soul. And the more you give yourself to it, the harder your life will be.

There is only one way out of this, the body tells me. At this point, I don’t know if it means drugs or death.

“Just A. I came up with it when I was a little kid. It was a way of keeping myself whole, even as I went from body to body, life to life. I needed something pure. So I went with the letter A.”

It’s so hard when you’re in one body to get a sense of what life is really like. You’re so grounded in who you are.

But when who you are changes every day—you get to touch the universal more.

You learn how much a day is truly worth, because they’re all so

different. If you ask most people what the difference was between Monday and Tuesday, they might tell you what they had for dinner each night. Not me. By seeing the world from so many angles, I get more of a sense of its dimensionality.”

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.

When I was a child, I didn’t understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn’t comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite—I’d be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station.

Only no one is looking. We both need to talk to someone.

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious.

And this is the problem with being in a new body each day—the history is there, but it’s not visible. It has to be different from last time, because I am different.

feel like I’m meeting a new person every time I see you. Because you can’t be there for me. Because I don’t think I can like you no matter what. Not like this.”

“The thing that ended up tripping me up was the concept of tomorrow. Because after a while, I started to notice—people kept talking about doing things tomorrow. Together. And if I argued, I would get strange looks. For everyone else, there always seemed to be a tomorrow together. But not

for me.

“What’s your name today?” “A,” I tell her. “For you, it’s always A.”

This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.

This alone is its own being. Feeling the body, but not using it to sidetrack the mind. Moving with purpose, but not in a rush. Conversing not with the person next to you, but with all of the elements.

I sit down on a rock and drink some water. I know I am in her body, but it feels very much like she is here with me. Like we are two separate people, together, sharing this.

At the very beginning of my letter, I ask her to try to remember the day as much as possible before she reads on, so what I write won’t taint what’s really left in her mind. I explain that I never would have chosen to be in her body, that it isn’t something I have control over.

It is the first time I’ve ever written to the person whose life I’ve occupied, and it feels both strange and comfortable, knowing that Rhiannon will be the reader of these words.

The fact that I am writing the letter at all is an expression of faith—faith both in her and in the belief that trust can lead to trust, and truth can lead to truth.

You can’t leave now. I have more questions. I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s the wrong way to think about

the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

ultimately comforting process of finding it.

“I am not the devil,” I say. “I am not a demon. I am not any of the things you want me to be. I am just a person. A person who borrows other people’s lives for a day.”

“The amazing thing,” he tells me, “is that you still haven’t learned how to make it last longer than a single day. You have no idea the power that you possess.”

But when I looked closely at him, I saw someone else inside. I recognized him in the same way that Rhiannon recognized me. Only, I also saw danger there. I saw someone who does not play by the same set of rules.

I am not the only one.

I cannot wrap my thoughts around this. The fact that there could be others. They may have been in the same school as me, the same room as me, the same family as me. But because we keep our secret so hidden,

there’d be no way...

There are others.