This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.

There was never this—a day spent floating from one thing to another. This was how Alice imagined marriage, and family—always having someone to float through the day with, someone with whom it didn’t take three emails and six texts and a last-minute reservation change to see one another.

It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.

Alice had been in love a few times, enough to know that soul mates were a myth and that a person’s requirements and tastes changed as they did.

but she had spent the last twenty-odd years learning that waiting was an inefficient way to get what she wanted.

Alice imagined a graph that showed how much people’s personalities shifted after high school on one axis and on the other, how many miles away from home they had moved. It was easy to stay the same when you were looking at the same walls.

People were allowed to outgrow relationships, of course, Alice knew that, but still—there were times when you were supposed to show the fuck up.

Alice just wanted to push her hands against the walls of her life and see if they would move.

She was feeling too out of sorts to read a book—she’d stared at her bookshelf for almost twenty minutes, unable to decipher if she wanted a happy ending or science fiction or something with death on the first page—and so had turned on the latest episode of her favorite podcast,

But I think that I was too young to really know what my choices were going to mean—there’s not really any way to find out what you need to find out, you know? Like, if someone is going to be a good parent, or they have some weird, fucked-up patriarchal bullshit that won’t surface until they’re forty, or if they’re terrible with money, or if they refuse to go to therapy. There should be an app for that.”

She hadn’t thought of it as an ongoing choice, a perennial decision, and the idea of it made her both exhausted and glad. Glad that she wasn’t the only one who felt like she was always in the middle of planning her future, and exhausted that there was no way off the ride.