Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

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

“That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.”

They were goddamn gorgeous, those two.

“Well, if I hadn’t been in the hospital, I never would have met you,” Sam said. “And we never would have become friends. And then enemies—”

“Terribly,”

Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

And so they invented reasons—some of them even compelling and real. And they had not done this for the game or the company, but because they loved him, and they were his friends. And he felt grateful.

“No, it was Chin.” Anna started to cry. She was crying for the other Anna Lee, who threw herself from a building, and this Anne, who, no doubt, had also had Chip Willingham’s fingers where they shouldn’t have been, and herself:

If she doesn’t take the job on Press That Button! and if Anna can’t afford to buy the new car. If Anna buys the new car but drives directly home after dinner. If the first Anna Lee doesn’t jump from that building and if Anna never comes to Los Angeles. If Anna doesn’t stop driving after she hits the coyote. If Anna finds the emergency lights. If Anna never sleeps with George.

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.

Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

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.

“It’s my sister’s game. Of course I found the time.”

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.)

home. She closed her eyes for a second, and she imagined herself back under the red gates of Nezu. A gate and a gate and a gate. And at the end of all the gates, Marx. Marx, in a white linen shirt and rolled-up khakis and a silly straw fedora that Zoe had bought him at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. He takes off the hat, and he tips it to her. She turned onto her side to smile at Marx in bed. “I love this city,” she said. “Maybe we could live here someday?” he said.

“She’s nice, but she’s no Sadie. I don’t feel like anyone in the world knows me except Sadie.”

“Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets. You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”

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.

“The beginning was the hardest, but then days passed, and months, and years, and you got better, and it was not quite so hard,” Bong Cha said.

To an outsider, it didn’t obviously signify the death of his partner. It was just a hole.

the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

“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.”