All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

I’m not from the future. I’m from an alternate timeline. It’s still today. It’s just a different today.

“I don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now.

You don’t need time travel to smash apart a world.

But it helps.

People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have.

This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life.

You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant past, the failure ends. That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.

yeah, that’s how I figured it went.

but here’s what I think this book is about—there’s no such thing as the life you’re supposed to have.