New Slash Better Day Tomorrow

The journal came in an unmarked parcel. We found it on the front steps of our building in the middle of the day, when we were going out to lunch. At first, we didn’t want to open it, because we held lofty ideas about privacy, and we wanted our actions to reflect that. Instead, we asked around about it—maybe it was Becky’s, sometimes she was forgetful like that and would have things shipped to the office even though she meant it to go to her apartment. But Becky hadn’t ordered anything online since the fiasco last month, which she kept on telling us about and we kept on forgetting about; the parcel was not hers. It was not anyone’s, and there was no address to send it back to, so eventually, we opened it.

The journal was well-worn, so it was immediately obvious that it was someone’s. It had thumbprints on the side, so you could see where the owner held it while they wrote in it, maybe they kept it on their bedside and sometimes reached out in the middle of the night to fumble it into their hands and scribble a dream that had woken them up—we did this sometimes. We understood.

We were confused. Why had this been sent to us? We got anonymous tips often, but never like this—usually there was a note enclosed in the parcel, usually there was a phone call letting us know that it was coming. We had procedures set up for this sort of thing—anonymous dropboxes so that people could make sure they deposited their documents safely. Phone lines that were on 24/7.

It can’t be important, we thought, because they just left it on the front steps. Anyone could have taken it. Or maybe, we thought, that means that this is the most important thing we’ve ever received.

After some deliberation, we decided the only thing left to do was open the journal, and read it. Maybe it would tell us some secrets about the Iranian government, or maybe it would be the Rosetta Stone to decoding Palestine nuclear codes. This was the sort of stuff that we dealt with.. We sat around the glass table in the biggest conference room and our editor-in-chief opened up the journal. She was wearing gloves. Just in case.

There was a silence as she read. And then, she looked up, and said, almost disappointed, it’s a grocery list.

Groceries—this is something it took us some time to wrap our heads around.

What about the rest of it? Someone asked.

Our editor flipped through the rest of the pages. It’s—it’s a diary of some sorts. She said. Just groceries and to-do lists and stuff.

What kind of groceries do they buy? Frank, the office clown, asked. We all laughed. The editor pursed her lips and read—apples. Hamburger meat. Deodorant and hair gel and almonds. The editor paused, squinted in at the writing, then said: the salted kind.

We all nodded, more somber. Those ones are better, Lila said quietly. And she was right. We could all appreciate that sort of thing—we had all had to distinguish what kinds of almonds we might have wanted on that particular day on our grocery list. And there was something about knowing the kind of almonds a person preferred that meant that you knew them in an intimate sort of way.

The journal became something of a deity. When we had time—during breaks, lunch, the beginning and ends of the work day—we would huddle around whoever had laid claim to it it that day and comb through the pages. After a while, we decided that we would call the journal’s owner Sam, because it was a name that would work for both a man and a woman, and, we all agreed, if we knew a Sam, they would definitely have a journal, and their writing would look just like the writing in the journal that we had.

 

Sam’s journal had everything in it. There were more lists of groceries—Sam was very partial to apples, and ate them often, sometimes Sam would distinguish between red and green, once Sam put ‘gala apple’ and then, in parenthesis, put ‘in season!’. It was written just like that, with a little exclamation mark after it, and we were all overjoyed for Sam, so glad that they would get to eat gala apples, which are so often not in season.

But Sam bought other things too—air freshner, sometimes, dish soap and plungers and plastic forks and once, ‘bottle of wine for Lindsay’s mom – ask Lindsay what kind she likes’.

We would often find other people’s names in Sam’s journal. There would be random ‘to-do’ lists scattered in the pages with things like: call Cynthia and ask about the tax forms. Get Josh to reschedule Tuesday’s meeting. Buy a birthday gift for Lindsay (perfume? Tickets to Broadway? Ask her mom?) but there were never enough clues for us to actually try to find Lindsay, or anyone else. And honestly, we didn’t really think we wanted to find Lindsay—we had decided Sam’s journal was ours.

There was something so good about being able to stare into the mundanities of someone else’s life—our jobs were so often focused on big headlines and arching profiles about huge careers that we were grateful, at the end of the day, to read a list of people Sam had to send thank-you letters to, or the directions to the new butcher shop on 8^th that Sam had found on Google.

The best parts of the journal were the parts that were not lists, but just short reflections. Sometimes Sam would write brief paragraphs like:

Rough day today. Not sure how the meeting went – I know I can’t control these things but it seems as I get older I lose my edge. I should not worry too much. Will get a good nights sleep today and forget about it tomorrow.

Or, Sam would write something like: never been to the mountains before, not sure what I should pack? Skiing poles? How thick should gloves be? Don’t forget to ask next time!

Once, cramped in the space underneath another to-do list, Sam had just written: ‘new/better day tomorrow?’

We all loved this, and began saying it to each other when something hard was happening to one of us, or it was a hectic day in the office. New slash better day tomorrow? we would say, and we would say it like a question, with our voices lilting up at the end, so it sounded almost like a Catholic hymn.

As time went on, our work days grew longer—the leader of our country was making things more confusing, more tiring; there was never not something to write about, something to complain about, something to make us more cold and our hearts more solid.  We stayed late so often, typing so many things, that we stopped calling it ‘staying late’, it just became regular work. Sometimes we would not even go home at all—and instead of sleeping, when the sun began to rise we would lie on the floor next to our desks and someone would read Sam’s laundry lists out loud: overripe bananas for banana bread, vitamin C, the cherry flavored kind, a twelve-pack of socks, lotion, flour and eggs, pesto sauce, the kind that wasn’t the cheapest but also not the one that was wildly expensive. We would close our eyes and imagine Sam vividly—by now we knew, for sure, that he was a man, that he was in love with Lindsay but was bad at getting her (and her mother) things, that he wore glasses and sometimes contacts when he remembered to buy contact fluid, that he loved apples, especially gala, but only when they were in season. Sam was simple, Sam was us, we understood Sam, we loved Sam, we were, in a way, also Sam.

The leader of our country kept on saying things people asked us to interpret—we typed faster and faster, we resented him more and more. Our words got harsher and more angular, we would critique him mercilessly and without thought. Our editor got news that there was a Big Story about the leader of our country on the horizon, that he had let some classified document out on accident, and if we could find the document first, we could break the Big Story, and we could go down in history as heroes of a certain kind. We were excited, enraged, passionate; we typed faster than ever before, we did nothing but research and write and eat and then, for an hour at most, we would gather and read more from Sam’s journal.

By then, we had read it through completely, most of us had favorite parts, people would mouth along as we read his words aloud. Before we finished reading, we would always go back to the part where Sam wrote new/better day tomorrow? and we chant it, then fall silent and look around at each other. Every day, the question got a little more desperate. New/better day? Tomorrow? Every day, we would wonder. We would hope.

But we had less time to spend with Sam—our editor was insistent that we find whatever Big Story the leader of our country, our president, was sitting on. We pursued it as best we could—Frank found out that the president was frantic about whatever he had lost, which could only mean that it was something that could jeopardize the entire country, Becky wrote a piece about the legality of leaking classified information and the nature of impeachment charges, our editorial board wrote a critique of the government’s handling of the situation. Finally, almost an eternity later, Lila discovered a source who told her, under the condition of anonymity, that he could get her copy of the documents the president had lost.

He dropped it in the anonymous drop box we set up for him—we were very meticulous about those sort of things—and we all sat around the glass table of the biggest conference room to watch our editor in chief open the package. We were relieved to have finally obtained the documents, and were looking forward to seeing our beds and our families again. We had all placed bets on what would be inside—maybe secrets about the Iranian government, or the Rosetta Stone to decoding Palestine nuclear codes.

Our editor opened the package—it was a stack of grainy photocopies. She took the first page and read it out loud: apples. Hamburger meat. Deodorant and hair gel and almonds.

Our hearts fell to the bottom of our chests. We all said together: the salted kind.

The leader of our country was not named Sam. But, we realized slowly, he did have a wife named Lindsay, and we had never really thought about it, but he probably was also the kind of person who preferred salted almonds.