This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

The leaves of every tree in Central Park shimmered in the last gasp of sunlight. People who didn’t love New York could just fuck all the way off. Look at this place! Look at these benches, at these cobblestones, at these taxicabs and horses side by side! Whatever happened, she had this.

It was embarrassing, if you slowed down long enough to think about it, how many major life decisions happened because they looked like the model you’d been given.

Alice understood—this was how it worked. When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.

Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone was a lobster in the pot.

Alice had always been proud of her stride and speed as a walker. There was nothing like the satisfying feeling of stepping into a street as a car zoomed past, the daily ballet of a well-timed jaywalk. Jaywalking, Alice’s only professional sport!

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence.

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.

If there was one thing that Alice felt like she’d done wrong, it was being too passive. She hadn’t quit working at Belvedere like everyone else had, she hadn’t broken up with people when she knew they weren’t right for her, she hadn’t ever moved anywhere or done anything surprising. She was just floating. Like a seahorse.

She hadn’t spent the last twenty-odd years wishing that she’d been with Tommy, that she’d married Tommy, but she had spent the last twenty-odd years learning that waiting was an inefficient way to get what she wanted. If Alice was going to do anything better, it was that—making her wishes known.

Manhattan was best at two things: daytime and nighttime. The reasons were the same: the streets were always alive, always moving, always busy. Even when one felt lonely, it was nearly impossible to be alone in New York City.

She felt like she always had on certain summer nights, like she was already missing the moment that she was still living inside.

But Alice could read it for what it was, which was a love story. Not a romance—there was no sex in the entire book, a few kisses, that was it—the book was about the love between a single parent and their only child. It wasn’t funny. It was earnest. It was the kind of thing that Leonard would never have said aloud to Alice, not in a million years. But it was true all the same.

Alice wasn’t a writer, but she’d spent enough time sitting at dinner tables with novelists to understand that fiction was a myth. Fictional stories, that is. Maybe there were bad ones out there, but the good ones, the good ones—those were always true. Not the facts, not the rights and the lefts, not the plots, which could take place in outer space or in hell or anywhere in between, but the feelings. The feelings were the truth.

“We are. Most of the time. But we’re also both humans, you know, with different baggage about different shit. The things that drive me crazy about him might not drive someone else crazy. But it’s a choice—still. We’ve been married for fifteen years. But I still have to choose it. That doesn’t stop.”

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.

Not to sound too Buddhist about it, because I’m not a Buddhist, and I’m sure to get it wrong, but everything outside of you is window dressing, you know?”

She hoped it was true, what he’d said about love, about all of that love still existing in the world.

The reader hoped that Dawn had finally found her way home. Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope—hope was honest. Hope was good.