Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, “There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.

He was quick to laugh, warm and energetic, verging on goofy,

What was amazing to Sam—and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie—was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location.

good-looking rich kid with a wide range of interests and very few skills.

Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.

Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.

“Marx never met a genius he didn’t want to sleep with.”

Marx usually enjoyed the experience of making love to an ex, and this evening was no exception. It was interesting to note the way your body had changed and how their body had changed in the time since you’d last been intimate.

I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,”

He put his head in the crook of her shoulder; the freight was in proportion to the groove.

What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?”

To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.

In order to get through it, she began to imagine herself in a parallel game show.

It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

“You’re an afternoon woman, sexy Sadie. You don’t want to meet someone like you too early in your life, or you won’t ever like anyone else.”

There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.

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

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

Love you madly. 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.

“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.”

watching the first fireflies of summer.

Alas, what is the point of writing a poem if there is no one with whom to share it?

“Wait until we’ve decanted to begin the storytelling, if you don’t mind.”

“I believe that virtual worlds can help people solve problems in the real one.”

I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.”

It develops the plot.”

“No, I could never have a child so conventional,” Emily said.

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

know I’m middle-aged,” Dov said. “And out of touch. And I have, apparently, no idea what women want. Twice divorced, etcetera. But I must tell you. To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.” Dov shook his head. “Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”

“How can you not know this? Lovers are…common.” She studied Sam’s face. “Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”

“There aren’t any rough parts of New York now.”

She looked past the building to the sky. It was a deep, blue velvet night, and the moon hung heavy and supernaturally spherical in the sky. “I wonder who built this engine,” Sadie said. “It’s good work,” Sam said. “The God rays are nicely done, but the moon is almost too beautiful. The scale seems off.”

“How is it so large and low? And it needs more texture. A bit of Perlin noise. It should look a little rougher, otherwise it doesn’t seem real.” “But maybe that’s the look they were going for?” “Maybe so.”