Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?

(1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.

But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.

Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans.

You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.