My catchphrase is “I’ll do it tomorrow.” Dishes, light bulbs, that mountain of unpaid bills — I hand it all off to tomorrow-me. Tomorrow-me is a hard worker, so there’s nothing to worry about.
That’s the easy philosophy I’d been living by, until one morning the sun stopped moving.
“Hey, did you hear?” my neighbor Yama called over the fence. “The planet’s rotation just… stopped. Something broke somewhere, and now it’s stuck at noon.”
No rotation means the sun stays pinned to the same spot in the sky forever. Which means night was never coming back to this planet.
At first I just shrugged — huh, okay. But three days later the sky was still blue, and it finally hit me.
No night meant no morning either. “Tomorrow” was never, ever coming.
My blood ran cold. Every single task I’d outsourced to tomorrow-me came crashing down on present-me all at once. The dishes, the light bulbs, the bills, the New Year’s cards, the dentist appointment. All of it, now. All of it, me.
For the first time in my life, I worked until I was drenched in sweat. Washing dishes, swapping bulbs, tearing open envelopes. And still it never ended. The sun just hung up there, watching, smug and unmoving.
On day four, I invented something.
I draped a thick blanket over the laundry pole. Hung it over the window. The room slid into darkness.
“There. Night.”
I declared it out loud and crawled under the covers. Slept like the dead, woke up, yanked the blanket down. Blinding light flooded back in.
“There. Morning. — And today’s errands? I’ll do them tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was back.
The trick spread across the hillside in no time. Yama bought a blanket. The woman across the street bought one. Then her neighbor did too. Turns out we were all natural-born procrastinators.
These days, something strange happens on this hill.
Nobody coordinates it, nobody even calls out to the next house, but right when the sun hits its peak, every window on the hill goes dark at once. The whole hillside drops into shadow. And one more “tomorrow” is born for each of us, one day’s worth at a time.
Yesterday I ran into Yama at the hardware store. He had two blankets in his basket.
“One’s not enough,” he said. “Gotta stock up for tomorrow’s tomorrow too.”
I didn’t say a word. Just grabbed three.