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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
The streets had become a familiar scene; at least one business per block was boarded up by now. Often the owners placed signs on the locked doors and metal gates of their shuttered stores and restaurants with scribbled sentiments like “Gone to live my life,” “Spending more time with family,” or “Off to make some memories.” Maura passed by a piece of paper taped onto a former jewelry store: “Closed. Looking for closure.”
she realized, as she placed the novel atop her dresser, that this was the first time the world outside of her books had ever rivaled the stories with its very own plot twist.
women’s pain and Black people’s pain had a long history of being misdiagnosed or ignored.
Did a patient receive less care because her string was short, or was a patient’s string short because she received less care?
Maybe it didn’t matter anymore where the strings had come from. Even if they were sent from heaven, or beamed down from outer space, or traveled back in time from the distant future, it was people who decided what to do with them now.
watched a lot of people come to the end, and everyone around them kept begging them to fight. It takes real strength to keep on fighting, and yes, usually that’s the right answer. Keep fighting, keep holding on, no matter what. But sometimes I think we forget that it also takes strength to be able to let go.”
“But this is what humans have always done,” Maura said, her anger swelling inside. “We segment ourselves based on race or class or religion or whatever fucking distinctions we decide to make up, and then we insist on treating each other differently. We never should have allowed them to start labeling people as ‘long-stringers’ and ‘short-stringers.’ We made it too easy for them.”
Jack wondered what it would feel like to be so certain, so devoted. To feel that nothing about you was a mistake.
Normally, Amie relished all the “what ifs,” she dreamt in the conditional mood. But this was one question she couldn’t invite, one box she just couldn’t open. Whether the answer was fifty or ninety, she didn’t want any number in her head. Amie’s refuge was found in her fantasies, in her musings about the future. A number would destroy all of that. It would ground her. She simply had to live her life in oblivion, as if her string were somehow infinite. It was the only way she knew how.
He suddenly remembered a conversation with Maura, something about cryonics and mind-uploading, all the bargains and sacrifices that people made now in the hope of living on someday. But when Ben looked at the young woman before him, he thought about her string, and how every piece of the thread that extended beyond that afternoon in August was a portion gifted from Hank’s string to hers, how this woman’s life had been lengthened simply because Hank had been alive, and Ben realized that there was more than one way to live on.
“That’s life!” Nina shouted. “Before the strings arrived, that was the chance anyone took when they got married, or when they had kids. There was no guarantee. But you still vowed in sickness and in health, not knowing which one you’d get, and you still promised till death do us part, with no idea when that parting would occur.” Nina paused. “But now that we have the strings, suddenly the risk that every couple used to accept has become so unimaginable?”
“Here in South Africa, and around the world,” the girl said, “we have moved past the era of formal segregation and apartheid, but we have not shed our habits of prejudice and exclusion. Inequality has simply donned a new mask. Injustice has merely changed clothes. And, decade after decade, the pain feels the same. But what if we could break that cycle? “In a few months, I will turn twenty-two, and I will receive my box. Many of you, my fellow classmates, still have years to wait. Look, or don’t look. That is your choice. But it’s not the only choice we are faced with. “We have a chance, now,
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the words of E. B. White engraved in a thin sheet of metal atop the wood panel behind her: I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.
It always amazed Nina how children could forge such instant, honest connections, only to thrive on division as adults.
