Every Day

DAY 5996

All I get is tomorrow.

As I fell asleep, I had a glint of an idea. But I as I wake up, I realize the glint has no light left in it.

Today I’m a boy. Skylar Smith. Soccer player, but not a star soccer player. Clean room, but not compulsively so. Video-game console in his room. Ready to wake up. Parents asleep.

He lives in a town that’s about a four hour drive from where Rhiannon lives.

This is nowhere near close enough.

It’s an uneventful day, as most are. The only suspense comes from whether I can access things fast enough.

Soccer practice is the hardest part. The coach keeps calling out names, and I have to access like crazy to figure out who everyone is. It’s not Skylar’s best day at practice, but he doesn’t embarrass himself.

I know how to play most sports, but I’ve also learned my limits. I found this out the hard way when I was eleven. I woke up in the body of some kid who was in the middle of a ski trip. I thought that, hey, skiing had always looked fun. So I figured I’d try. Learn it as I went. How hard could it be?

The kid had already graduated from the bunny slopes, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a bunny slope. I thought skiing was like sledding – one hill fits all.

I broke the kid’s leg in three places.

The pain was pretty bad. And I honestly wondered if, when I woke up the next morning, I would still feel the pain of the broken leg, even though I was in a new body. But instead of the pain, I felt something just as bad – the fierce, living weight of terrifying guilt. Just as if I’d rammed him with a car, I was consumed by the knowledge that a stranger was lying in a hospital bed because of me.

And if he’d died . . . I wondered if I would have died too. There is no way for me to know. All I know is that, in a way, it doesn’t matter. Whether I die or just wake up the next morning as if nothing happened, the fact of the death will destroy me.

So I’m careful. Soccer, baseball, field hockey, football, softball, basketball, swimming, track – all of those are fine. But I’ve also woken up in the body of an ice hockey player, a gymnast, a horse jumper, and once, recently, a volunteer firefighter.

I’ve sat all those out.

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s video games. It’s a universal presence, like TV or the internet. No matter where I am, I usually have access to these things, and video games especially help me calm my mind.

After soccer practice, Skylar’s friends come over to play World of Warcraft . We talk about school and talk about girls (except for his friends Chris and David, who talk about boys.) This, I’ve discovered, is the best way to waste time, because it isn’t really wasted – surrounded by friends, talking crap and sometimes talking for real, with snacks around and something on a screen.

I might even be enjoying myself, if I could only unmoor myself from the place I want to be.