Let’s be reborn again tomorrow
“How are you gonna do tomorrow?”
“How are you?” is a mediocre question. “How have you been?” also sounds like a fake, caring opener line. Honestly, you don’t know whether the person is really doing well or not. In this economy (ps: in this regime), you can’t tell if this person is mentally stable or not.
I don’t know, ask something like ‘what are you gonna do tomorrow?’ maybe?
‘Tomorrow’ is nothing special than a word, a unit of time. Until it’s the only thing standing between you and starting over.
‘Tomorrow’ is rebirth.
At least, that’s what I got from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s a fictional novel about three best friends building a video game through the twists and turns of life. Until mid-book, I still didn’t know what ‘tomorrow’ had to do with the video game because they named their game ‘Ichigo,’ not some kind of day or time.
But then, it opened my eyes. In life, you’ll die once, and you can’t repeat it again. In a video game, you can be reborn again and again until the game ends. You always have tomorrow. Before reading this, I’d only played three video games in my life, including The Sims and Tomb Raider. They were fun, but that’s it. I never found the spark to spend my nights playing another ‘me’ in another universe.
After reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I get it. This book doesn’t teach you the technical skill of designing a game. Instead, it teaches you how to design a life, from another perspective. It doesn’t ask you to win the game, it guides you to understand the flow of the game, based on the thoughts of two unstable people (Sam and Sadie).
It is about hope, something unsettled, and healing.
Maybe this sounds a bit depressing, because it’s like choosing an alternate ending when your life didn’t happen the way you wanted. You might get called a ‘loser’ for choosing to walk away and take another path, leaving the mess behind or for pinning your hopes on the next life, just in case reincarnation is real.
It’s the same kind of defeatist thinking as the ‘if only I could be born again…’ thought. No, you’ll never be born again in the next life. Forget about the next life, you’d have to die first, and then who’s to say you’d be reborn with the exact same wish you have in this life?
You’ll start tomorrow.
Well, not literally the day after today. The thought of having ‘tomorrow’ is enough for a fresh start.
One line that made me sit up straight and cover my mouth is when one of the characters, Marx, said:
“What is a game? 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.”
Nothing is permanent, he said. I wish I could say that to every person who’s struggling, that this phase, these rough times, are temporary. Who knows, tomorrow might be better. Hey, you have an extra life tomorrow!
I know it’s difficult, it feels like drowning, it feels like there’s no hope under this shadow of an oppressive regime (cough) but I still have hope that tomorrow, I don’t know when, we’ll win. We’ll win against the uncertainty, the ugly thoughts in our heads, and everything that makes the word ‘tomorrow’ feel heavy.
Let’s win this, and be reborn again tomorrow.
