Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Do I dare believe the reset?

I took this book with me through four cities: Manila, Singapore, Narita, and, finally, New York.

I usually read fast but February and March had my mind floating away, not unlike a bird in a strawberry field. (If you read the book then you get the reference. 😭)

When I finally did manage to sit down and commit to it, I was in transit. But once I started there was no stopping. The gravity of the story pulled me in and, as so many friends promised, I was taken for a ride.

This book tells a simple message in such a special way: that everyone has their stuff. Their baggage. Their hopes. Their loves. Their choices. Somehow, all these things add up to a life.

And isn't that the story every writer fights to tell? What it really means to be human; what it's like to be a fragile speck on the earth.

I finished the bulk of the book on the plane and in the middle of reading, something interesting happened.

As we crossed over the Alaskan hemisphere the pilot rang his announcement bell to inform us that if we looked to the plane's left-hand side, we could see a bit of the aurora borealis. Everyone leapt to their feet and fought to peer through the tiny windows; necks craned, phones out, groggy but rearing to see this rare wonder.

I didn't get a photo but here is what I managed to catch: a thin seafoam green line dancing in the night sky, a ribbon of something majestic, an inflight miracle.

I'm in New York now because it's our first trip as a family since my dad passed away in 2020. We used to travel all the time but then he died and the pandemic shut the world down and nothing was ever really the same.

***

Okay, confession:

I wrote the bulk of this piece on the flight to New York but I'm only touching it again now, two weeks later as I prepare for my return to Manila.

Reader, I lost the thread. But let's see if I can somehow find it again.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about how the things we choose to love can both make and destroy us.

These days I think it's the talk of destruction that really interests me. In our obsessive cotton candy culture we tend to romanticize love, to speak of it in the sweetest light.

But give me something real, something true.

Because I am old enough to know that love can be a menace, a monster, a disease. Love can destroy the very best of us.

(This famous Fleabag scene is a prime example of how much love/longing/desire can hurt.)

Yet even then, even though it has the potential to wreck us beyond repair, it remains to be the worthiest of all human pursuits.

To love anyone or anything is to surrender any illusion of impenetrability. It means to be willing to be destroyed.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is told in the language of video games and here's what I know from buying a Switch last year: destruction is never really the end. Because in a game you can die and start over. Again and again and again. You get the gift of perpetuity, an eternal reset.

“The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There's not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world's code.” (Sam or Sadie from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow)

Real life, as you all know, is a completely different animal. Because real life is chaos. Real life has irreversible consequences. Real life has death. Real life contains losses that are absolute, that you cannot undo, not even if you tried.

But it isn't all bad, right? I mean, every once in a while, I guess if you're really really lucky, you get the aurora borealis peeking from your airplane window.

***

So did I do it? Did I make sense of an essay that started with so much promise?

I'm not sure. 😅

But I got waylaid by the business of living. And that's kind of what the book is about, at least that's part of what I gleaned — that though there is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, what really counts is today.

One last story before I go:

We recently went to an immersive exhibit called Destination Cosmos. We stood in a large hall as images of the universe filled the whole room.

Just like that, we were taken through space. Through planets and galaxies and our beautiful celestial neighborhood.

We learned about the different expeditions that were launched just so that humanity could understand the solar system a bit more. We watched the team at NASA scream in jubilation as Perseverance, the space rover, landed on Mars. We watched the infinite unfold all around us because that is the point, right?

To remind us that we're small. That we're specks in a never-ending universe.

That's what all good storytellers do. That's what humans are always doing. That's what the book strives to do. And what's why I love it.

It seems like such a cliché thing but we are so forgetful. We are too forgetful.

Each moment is a reset. And while there may be no end point to the infinite, may I humbly suggest that the point of today — and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow — is for each of us to be sufficiently wrecked and rebuilt by everything we love.