Elsewhere

by Gabrielle Zevin

‘In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know,’ the pug whimpers miserably. ‘For everyone else, it’s just another end.’

It is her last piece of Earth and the only evidence that she was ever there at all.

‘Dead,’ Aldous says, ‘is little more than a state of mind. Many people on Earth spend their whole lives dead, but you’re probably too young to understand what I mean.’

‘My advice to you is to stop being lonely and to stop hating it here. That always works for me,’ says the dog. ‘Oh, and be happy! It’s easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes a lot of work. It’s exhausting.’

‘I think of it like a tree, because every tree is really two trees. There’s the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there’s the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing up to the sky, and Elsewhere is the roots, growing down in opposing but perfect symmetry.

‘I guess I’m a little homesick,’ Liz admits, ‘but it’s the worst kind of homesickness because I know I can’t ever go back there or see them ever again.’ ‘That doesn’t just happen to people in Elsewhere, Liz,’ says Owen. ‘Even on Earth, it’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.’

‘But, Curtis,’ she protests, ‘we’re dead! We have to live without people all the time, and we don’t stop loving them, and they don’t stop loving us.’ ‘I said believes. No one actually needs another person or another person’s love to survive. Love, Lizzie, is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.’ ‘But, Curtis, doesn’t it have anything to do with being happy and making each other laugh and having fun times?’ ‘Oh, Lizzie.’ Curtis laughs. ‘If only it were so!’ ‘It’s very rude to laugh at a perfectly natural question,’ Liz says.

There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters’ unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.

Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human’s life is a beautiful mess.

For better or worse, this is my life, she thinks. This is my life. My life.

‘A life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length.

‘We never know what will happen,’ Betty says, ‘but I believe good things happen every day. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that’s life, isn’t it?’

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backward, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had. Furthermore, she isn’t sad to be a baby. As the wisest here know, it isn’t a sad thing getting older. On Earth, the attempt to stay young, in the face of maturity, is futile. And it isn’t a sad thing growing younger, either. There was a time Liz was afraid that she would forget things, but by the time she truly began to forget, she forgot to be afraid to forget. Life is kind, the baby thinks.