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.

Sadie didn’t know why she bothered. You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones. Sadie was, by nature, a loner, but even she found going to MIT in a female body to be an isolating experience. The year Sadie was admitted to MIT, women were slightly over a third of her class, but somehow, it felt like even less than that. Sadie sometimes felt as if she could go weeks without seeing a woman. It might have been that the men, most of them at least, assumed you were stupid if you were a woman. Or, if not stupid, less smart than they were. They were operating under the assumption that it was easier to get into MIT if you were a woman, and statistically, it was—women had a 10 percent higher admittance rate over men. But there could have been many reasons for that statistic. A likely one was self-elimination: female applicants to MIT might have held themselves to higher standards than male applicants. The conclusion should not have been that the women who got into MIT were less gifted, less worthy of their places, and yet, that seemed to be what it was.

“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” 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.

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

But the fact is, no one at Opus was pushing Sadie to put herself forward either. The men at Opus wanted Sam to be the face of Ichigo, and so he was. The gaming industry, like many industries, loves its wonder boys.

The Nezu Shrine has a tunnel of red torii gates for visitors to pass through. Sadie asked what it meant when you passed under the gates, and Marx said in Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to the sacred.

It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.) She walked through another gate. What was a gate anyway? 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.

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.

“It’s like finding Jesus.” “It’s like finding out the things you believed in as a child are actually real.” “It’s like eating the mushrooms in Super Mario.” “It’s like recovering from dysentery.” “It’s like Christmas morning.” “It’s like all eight nights of Hanukkah.” “It’s like having an orgasm.” “It’s like having multiple orgasms.” “It’s like watching a great movie.” “Reading a great book.” “Playing a great game.” “It’s like finishing debugging on your own game.” “It’s the taste of youth itself.” “It’s feeling well after a long sickness.” “It’s running a marathon.” “I’ll probably never have to do a single other thing in my life, because I tasted this peach.”

We must fill our infinite days with something.”

“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?”

Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.