This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

Alice saw it now: all her life, she’d thought of death as the single moment, the heart stopping, the final breath, but now she knew that it could be much more like giving birth, with nine months of preparation. Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait—his

She would feel immeasurably older when he was gone.

Alice didn’t know if she wanted to have children, but she knew that at some point in the very near future, her not knowing would swiftly transform into a fact, a de facto decision. Why wasn’t there more time?

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.

It wasn’t that she was afraid that he was going to die—he was dying, she knew that. It was that she didn’t know when it was going to happen, or what it would feel like when it did, and she was afraid that she would feel relieved, and afraid that she would feel too sad to go to work,

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.

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

One of the worst parts about being a teenager was realizing that life wasn’t the same for everyone—Alice

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.

The problem with adulthood was feeling like everything came with a timer—a

It was still so strange to see her body—her young body, a body she hardly remembered as it was, because she’d been so busy seeing it as something it wasn’t.

This was what Alice had been missing. Not just the answers to questions that she’d never been brave enough to ask, and not just family history that no one else knew, and not just visions of her own childhood through her father’s eyes, but also this: the embarrassing stories she’d heard a thousand times and would never hear again. She could see the whole concert, Leonard’s sweaty, smiling face—before he was married, before he was a dad, before he’d published a book. She could see it as clearly as she could see the whale, even with her eyes closed.

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

The first twenty years of her life had gone by in slow motion—the endless summers, the space from birthday to birthday almost immeasurable—but the second twenty years had gone by in a flash. Days could still be slow, of course, but weeks and months and sometimes even years zipped along, like a rope slipping through your hands.

Marriage was clearly all about compromise, and parenthood so much about sacrifice, but like everything else that was difficult and unappealing, those conditions were much easier to stomach the sooner they were introduced.

The dog was an ancient dachshund and couldn’t go up or down the steps by himself, and so plaintively barked every time he wanted to be in a place he wasn’t.

Isn’t it weird how when you’re in high school, a kid who is, like, six months younger than you but a grade behind feels like an actual baby?

what it feels like to love someone so much, and then have them change into someone else. You love that new person, but it’s different, and it all happens so fast, even the parts that feel like they just last for fucking ever while they’re happening.”

He had been young, and she had been young—they had been young together. Why was it so hard to see that, how close generations were? That children and their parents were companions through life.

“But that love doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, inside everything you do. Only this part of me is going somewhere, Al. The rest? You couldn’t get rid of it if you tried. And you never know what’s going to happen next. I was older than you are now when I met Debbie. Time to go forward into the breach. Until the future, at last.”

Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic, how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.