Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.”

She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga.

You are in the strawberry field.

You are dead.

A prompt comes up on the screen: Start game from the beginning?

Yes, you think. Why not? If you play again, you might win.

Suddenly, there you are, brand-new, feathers restored, bones unbroken, sanguine with fresh blood.

You are flying more slowly than last time, because you don’t want to miss any of it. The cows. The lavender. The woman humming Beethoven. The distant bees. The sad-faced man and the couple in the pond. The beat of your heart before you go onstage. The feel of a lace sleeve against your skin. Your mother singing Beatles songs to you, trying to sound like she’s from Liverpool. The first playthrough of Ichigo. The rooftop on Abbot Kinney. The taste of Sadie mixed with Hefeweizen beer. Sam’s round head in your hands. A thousand paper cranes. Yellow-tinted sunglasses. A perfect peach.

This world, you think.

You are flying over the strawberry field, but you know it’s a trap.

This time, you keep flying.

Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.

She walked through another gate.

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.

By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.

But I want to do it anyway. I don’t know how to stop myself from wanting to do it. Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I’ll ask you to make a game with me. There’s some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea.”

“You have had tragedy, yes, but you have had many good friends as well.”

“Is two considered many?” Sam asked.

“It depends on how good the friendships are,”

O crystal heart,

Unbeating lovely:

Such Beauty

Must have

Consequence

There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

“It’s okay, Marx,” Sadie says. “You can let go.”

As the brain is detaching from the body, you think, How I will miss the horses