Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

Time, Sam thought, was a mystery.

Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery.

the crowd seemed to part for her, in a way that the world never moved for him.

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.

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.

She had handwritten the label. He would know her handwriting anywhere.

The world sans Alice was bleak, like a grainy photograph of Neil Armstrong on the moon,

Sadie didn’t feel like invoking cancer, the destroyer of natural conversation.

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.

“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.”

To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

Most friendships cannot be quantified, but the form provided a log of the exact number of hours Sadie had spent being friends with Sam.

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

Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.

He had never said that word before, and the word felt exotic, as if he were speaking a foreign language.

Life is very long, she thought, unless it is not.

There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.”

he ran his hand up and down her body, in an appraising way, like a farmer inspecting land he was about to sell.

With his sweet, roundish face, light-colored eyes, and mix of white and Asian features, Sam looked almost exactly like an anime character.

at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.

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 were people with whom you might have a decent conversation for twenty minutes. But to find someone who you wanted to talk to for 609 hours—that was rare. Even Marx—Marx was devoted, creative, and bright, but he was not Sadie.

He was already imagining Sam-and-Sadie lore, and

he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

A bromide about the creative process is that an artist’s first idea is usually the best one.

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.

It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.

simple. I want to make something that will make people happy.”

But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.”

“What is it about me? Why am I a Laertes and not a Hamlet?” The friend had seemed uncomfortable when Marx had posed the question. “It’s your quality,” he had said.

Sadie knew that the key to making a video game on limited resources was to make the limitations part of the

It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did.

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.

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.

How do we communicate in a world when we don’t have language?

he made things easy for them. He fought fires. He anticipated needs and obstacles before they arose.

But the best thing Marx did for them was this: He believed in them.

If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people. Marx’s favorite adjective was “interesting.” The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could. In the first months she knew him, Sadie disparaged Marx to Sam by calling him “the romantic dilettante.”

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.

There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.

Marx recognized it as the intimacy of ex-lovers.

The point of your education has been to do exactly the thing that you’re currently doing.

The universe, he felt, was just—or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return.

The path now seemed dismal and dangerous to her. And she thought to herself that it was strange how quickly the world could shift.

“I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.”

He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

“Why do you suddenly care about money? You’re twenty-two, how much money do you need? If you wanted to make money, you never should have made the game. You could have done Harvard recruiting, and ended up with a six-figure job at Bear Stearns, like everyone else in your class.”

The gaming industry, like many industries, loves its wonder boys.

This was before the internet. You couldn’t just cheat. You had to know someone who knew…”

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