Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.”

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

The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. 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. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.

Sam had hated being told to “fight,” as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.

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

I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

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.

This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them.

Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless.

“If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked.

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.