Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

“I feel like I never stopped seeing you. I feel like we come down to this T station to stare at this poster every day.”

If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.

He would invent that she had been cold toward him, that she hadn’t even had a class that day, that she had simply wanted to get away from Sam. His brain would insist that if she’d wanted to see him, she would have given him a way to contact her.

“You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

Sadie liked the phrase “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves.

“But I’m not currently dying.” “That’s good.” “Are you dying?” the boy asked. “No,” Sadie said. “Not currently.”

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

“Next time, we fail better.”

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

life is very long, unless it is not.”

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

He fantasized that the universe was a Rube Goldberg machine. If he had blown out only nine candles, maybe the Romanian girl would have won instead.

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

Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.

I’m going to play until the end of this life.”

“Will she be okay?” Sam said. “I think so,” Anna said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She would be okay. Dead was okay.

to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.

“I love you.” “Terribly,” he said.

It was as if all these years Sam had been waiting for an audience.

And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

“You see it in the water. You see it in the light,” Sadie said. “You see it everywhere, if you know where to look.”

“The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.

Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

Sam did not believe his body could feel anything but pain, and so he did not desire pleasure in the same way that other people seemed to. Sam was happiest when his body was feeling nothing. He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when

Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.

Maybe this is selfish, but I don’t want to love more than I am loved. And I don’t want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.”

It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don’t have to play this losing game all the way through.

“I might have loved you once,” Sam said. “And I’ll always care for you in my way, but we wouldn’t work together. I’ve known that for years.” “Yes,” she agreed.

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.

“Why don’t you tell me how you see it?”

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”