creative nonfiction by Anika Ledina
I never mean to leave things to the last minute, but somehow it always happens.
There is just something so sweet about the word tomorrow that rolls off the tip of my tongue.
The funny thing about tomorrow is that it never comes— it is always the next day, and the next, infinitely sprawling out across history until the end of time itself.
I remember in the third grade my teacher wanted to know where we were from, how our ancestors came to live here, in New England. She requested that we make a diorama, a scene of our family’s immigration, like a snapshot of our history; our history before we existed.
I thought to myself about the day they left Europe; that was a tomorrow at one point. Everything was tomorrow the day before it happened.
It was supposed to be in a shoe box, not too big or too small. She didn’t want parents to have to drive us to school, but she wanted our fat childish fingers to make something presentable. She wanted us to finish something we could truly be proud of.
I didn’t have a shoe box, nor did I need new shoes. Without a base, a structure to suspend the scene in, I couldn’t start. So I didn’t.
I’d tell myself that I’d worry about it tomorrow.
I don’t think I ever finished the project, but I also don’t believe it ever mattered in the first place. Everyone is here now, aren’t we?
In the eighth grade, things mattered more, or at least that is what the teachers said. They told us that this was the beginning of the end of our education, that we would graduate in a few years, and ‘play time’ would be over. Real life would begin.
They told us that if we failed a test, we would fail a class. If we failed classes, we wouldn’t be recommended for other ones that we wanted to take. If we didn’t take enough classes, we wouldn’t graduate, get into college, get a job… We would be a burden to society.
We would not be useful to them.
So we had to pull our own weight.
Just like that, our whole lives would depend on every exam, every assignment, but I wasn’t ready for my life. No one was.
Life was the kind of problem that you worry about tomorrow: never today, only tomorrow.
“If you work hard today, tomorrow will be better.”
I heard those words over and over again, ringing like an alarm, but you can never turn it off, only put it on snooze. They said it every day, as if we would forget. But the fabled tomorrow they sung about, never really came. Nothing ever got better.
It wasn’t long before I ran out of things to look forward to. Tomorrow no longer seemed like a relief, like the light at the end, but instead a list of task after task piling up. I had to become a forklift to keep pushing things out further and further, until the load began to cast a shadow over every iteration of today.
I would clear a path through my room every night to go to sleep, pushing the piles of dirty laundry and unfinished work to the sides of my bedroom. I knew that this was a fire hazard, but frankly, I didn’t care. They were all things to deal with tomorrow. Work tomorrow. Clean tomorrow. Brush my teeth tomorrow. Shower tomorrow. Eat tomorrow.
My therapist, the one my mom picked for me, wanted me to think of it like digging a hole. When you did everything you needed to do today, you stayed on the surface, on solid ground. But when you missed something, you would sink into the dirt and get stuck, and it would get harder every time you mess up, you would be deeper and deeper. It would take more and more to get you out, to return to a baseline.
I didn’t like that. It felt wrong to think of being overwhelmed as being beneath the surface. I didn’t like that if someone were to see me struggling, they would be looking down at me, peering into my dark, dreary hole.
Instead I wished that the world was built like a highway, and not some porous mountain of quicksand. When the interstates were built, cars weren’t as stable on hills and turns. In the face of obstacles, humans took it upon themselves to blow up the mountains that stood in their way. With a few stacks of dynamite, chronic problems could be solved, permanently.
I told her that life should be like that. We have the capacity to make things better and we choose not to so that others can know what it is like to struggle. I lamented over the audacity of adults complaining that ‘kids have it easy these days.’ Why would you wish hardship on others just because you had to deal with it? Shouldn’t people want better for their kids?
I began to wonder if the little people in my shoebox scene all those years ago thought I should have to cross the Atlantic again, just to prove I belonged there.
When I asked my therapist, she said that I should be the one to make it better for the people who come next. She said, “Maybe getting across the Atlantic was their battle, and living here in this world, making it better, fighting for the construction of the highway, maybe that’s yours.”
Why does life always seem to be about fighting?
Why can’t any one thing just be easy?
It wasn’t long before they told me I had an attention deficit disorder, depression, and a whole other laundry list of issues. I just think I’m human, but they wanted to fix me, make me better. Or maybe they just wanted to make me tolerable to them.
My treatment was constantly changing, but almost always featured many medications on unreasonably high doses. Cymbalta, Aripiprazole, Dexmethylphenidate, Bupropion, Fluoxetine, Trintellix, L Methyl Folate, often several together at once in what felt like hundreds of different combinations.
I had a few questions:
How is drugging me into contentment any different than putting off assignments?
Different from putting off my problems?
Different than pushing me to the side so you can move on to the next thing?
I didn’t want to be a problem for someone else to solve. It seemed I was their assignment to procrastinate. I didn’t want this, not any of this. I didn’t want anything.
I read the warnings in the little pamphlets that came with the bottles, and I read online that at my weight, with 10 pills I could be done. 1500mg… 1.5g. It would be a painful overdose, but all of it would be over. I could just abandon the whole concept of Tomorrow in both its glory and horror, and drift off into sweet oblivion.
I looked at myself in the mirror, until my gaze drifted to the bottle.
Tomorrow. I’ll end this tomorrow.
But I woke up with a fever, forgetting about my plans, and went downstairs like any day. I stayed home with my brother and watched episode after episode of The Promised Neverland. It was an anime about young children raised in paradise, but marked as livestock, meant to be eaten by tall grotesque demons who drew their intelligence from feeding on sapient brains.
In between episodes, we talked about how life felt like that sometimes; like we were alive for a reason, but it loomed like some horrible shadow. What was the point in contributing to a world that consumes us like products?
He walked me upstairs, and I got ready for bed.
I think on some level my brother knew I wasn’t okay, and that he felt the same way, the same dread for life ahead. I wished I could be there for him, but knew he would be fine on his own. He always managed to be okay in the end.
I looked at the pills…
Tomorrow. Definitely Tomorrow.
I woke up the next morning, and crawled downstairs, weak and sick.
The doctor said it was a very bad case of the flu, and that I was not allowed to do anything for two weeks.
I smiled and cried, coughed, sputtered and laughed. Free for two weeks. Free.
I went home and watched more TV, and my mother gathered all the blankets in the house and I burritoed myself. Burritoed is an amazing word, it captures the feeling of being contained, comfortable, and also somehow, delightfully, childishly free. Free.
We watched hundreds of episodes of Criminal Minds, a show about these super smart FBI profilers who use statistics and theories of criminology to understand why people do horrible things, and how to stop them.
I loved the episodes where I could see myself in the killer, not because I would ever hurt someone, but because of the way the profilers would approach them, and talk so softly and tell them that they had a choice. After all that they’d done, the hole they dug for themselves, they could still choose. And I loved when they chose to stop, to surrender. I loved that after everything they did, they could let go.
I knew that these people would go to prison, or a psychiatric asylum. And I knew their actions would haunt them for the rest of their lives, and that they would face consequences, but for a moment someone had looked at them and seen a human. A person, scared, traumatized, psychotic even, but still human.
At night I looked at the pills.
Tomorrow.
And the next night,
Tomorrow.
And like every other Tomorrow, it was undefined, abstract, hypothetical. I began to account for the pills out of ritual, a habitual confirmation that I always had an out. I could always escape, and that every day, I had the power to choose whether to be here or not.
I began to understand that in this world, how I got to live wasn’t under my control, but if I lived; that was something I could decide. And every night I chose to see one more dawn. I always chose to live another day.
I didn’t go back to school, not for a long time, even when I was better. A pandemic swept through the nation, and I watched the death toll rise, and knew that each number was a person, a person who could not control their fate the way I could.
Yet, I was grateful to stay at home—I studied when I wanted to, ate when I wanted to, slept when I wanted to. And all at once it dawned on me that I wanted something again, even if it was only to sleep and eat.
I would look at the pills every night, and what was once a pledge to die tomorrow became a consideration of maybe next week, next month, or even after this thing I’m excited for.
Despite my pain, I pushed off death every day of my life, because there were moments worth living for. I laughed with my mother and brother, and I dreamed of blowing up the mountains that stood in my way, so no one would ever have to climb them again, at least not alone.
This dream became a different type of Tomorrow, not one defined by an end, but a beginning. My romanticization of death was no longer associated with a day looming so close but never arriving. It instead took the form of a distant future, totally eclipsed by the aspirations of my new Tomorrow: the coming days, weeks, and months.
Tomorrow came when I took the envelope knife I once daydreamed about dragging along my skin and used it to open my college acceptance letter.
Tomorrow came when I smiled in that old mirror, seeing myself in graduation robes.
Tomorrow came when I packed my last toiletries for college, and I eyed that bottle for the last time. It was empty now, long since finished as prescribed, and never refilled. I picked it up and felt it in my hands.
I guess it’s okay that sometimes things don’t get finished, and sometimes it’s better that way.
I pushed it off the bathroom counter, into the trash.
I choose to live: now, today, and tomorrow.
