The Measure

by Nikki Erlick

The measure of your life lies within. Sure, it’s pointing to the string inside, but maybe that’s not the only measure we have. Maybe there are thousands of other ways we could measure our lives—the true quality of our lives—that lie within us, not within some box. And, by your own measure, you can still be happy. You can live well.

But, in Italy, I think we already knew. We already put the art first, the food first, the passion first,” she explained, a sweep of her arm encompassing the entire shop. “And we already put the family first. We did not need the strings to tell us what is most important.”

uniform merely an ill-fitting costume.

Jack had to remind himself that it wasn’t such a crime to feel lost—he was only twenty-two, after all. Wasn’t this the time in your life when you were allowed to feel adrift?

the uncomfortable irony wasn’t lost on Jack that he had been given a long string, a long life, and yet he didn’t know how to spend it, while Javi was the one with purpose.

knotted laces on Javier’s sneakers—two strings tied together, like his and Javi’s would forever be.

“It’s strange, because people often talk about that dream of ‘the simple life,’ or focusing on ‘the simple things.’ But just because you live in the country, away from all the superficial stuff, I guess that doesn’t really make life any less complicated.”

Se il per sempre non esiste lo inventeremo noi. Her forehead scrunched, her brain searching for the words. “If forever doesn’t exist,” she said, “we’ll invent it ourselves.”

He couldn’t wait to get to New York. He had only visited the city a few times before, but he knew that it was the only place in the world where there was always a crowd, no matter where you went or what time it was. The only place where his anonymity, an almost-normal life, was all but guaranteed.

Ben had no idea that Hank was an organ donor; nobody mentioned it at the funeral. But it made perfect sense, didn’t it? A hero’s final act.

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.

But now, no matter how long my string is, every day just feels so sacred. And I don’t want to waste any time feeling sad or distracted. I just want to be grateful. To live as much life as possible.”

we could each find our own measure of happiness.

“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?”

It is up to us—the ones who have yet to receive our boxes—to decide what type of world we wish to inherit, no matter how much time our strings may give us.”

Help them see that we are all the same, all connected. We are all strung together.”

The Bachelor, recently spun off into two separate franchises: The Bachelor: Long Strings and The Bachelor: Short Strings.

#StrungTogether,

What if we knew that our waiter, our cabdriver, our teacher, had a short string? Would we show them greater kindness?

She needed to look beyond the small circumference of their lives, needed the rest of the world to see her as Nina did. As someone worth loving. As an equal.

But Maura knew better than to blindly trust, or to risk growing complacent. She knew that things could always get worse, unless enough people kept on fighting.

The Health Department recorded the beginnings and endings of life, while just next door, couples vowed to support each other through everything in between.

Marriage Bureau felt like a fancier DMV,

We both know that what people post online, and what they tell their friends, isn’t always the way they vote when the curtains close.”

The memories somehow seemed further in the past than they actually were, and Jack wondered if this was adulthood, if life moved so much more quickly after you’ve grown up.

world of unimaginable pain and unfathomable joy, the two poles never so far from one another.

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.

so many of the people he cared about most he had met in that single orbit around the sun.

He said that if he had a short string, he’d feel too rushed to produce good work, and if he had a long string, he might not feel rushed enough.”

“We humans have an impulse to mark our existence in some way that feels permanent. We scribble ‘I was here’ onto our desks at school. We spray-paint it on walls. We carve it into bark. I was here. I wanted this sculpture to do the same, to let it be known that these people lived.

He gripped it tightly in front of him, the same card that had been passed down from Gertrude to her lover, from Simon to his friend, from Grandpa Cal to his grandson, and from Jack on to him, even when he thought he didn’t want it.

job hiring, school admissions, loan applications, health care, adoptions.

Some ultimately felt grateful for the boxes, for the chance to say goodbye, to never regret the last words uttered. Others found comfort in the strings’ uncanny power, enabling them to believe that the lives of their short-string loved ones were not, in fact, cut short.

It made losing them somehow easier to accept, trusting that nothing could have changed the ending, that their deaths did not hinge upon any particular decisions they made, what they did or didn’t do. Because of the strings, there was no need to wonder what might have happened if they had lived in a different city, or eaten different foods, or driven a different route home. The loss still hurt, of course, still didn’t make sense, but it was almost a relief not to be hounded by what-ifs.

But isn’t it better to spend ten years really loving someone, rather than forty years growing bored or weary or bitter?

It was an entire, wonderful tale in and of itself, and even though I’ve been given more chapters than Maura, her pages were the ones you couldn’t put down.

That the beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.

people still wondered, would always wonder, where the boxes came from, and why they were sent. Were they meant only for the individual, to use the knowledge of your own life span however you saw fit? Or were they offered to the world in communion, to prompt some greater global change?

Nina wondered if perhaps she herself could try living as if it were short, unafraid of the unexpected, embracing the chance to say yes.