Tomorrow

Today

The morning came, and everything was different.

“Well, fuck,” Oliver Santos said, immediately and loudly. “Fucking fucking fuck-fuck.”

He knew what was happening as soon as he opened his eyes. In fact, he knew what was happening before he opened his eyes. After five hundred and sixty-three days of the bright morning sun streaming through his bedroom curtains at exactly the same angle and intensity, it was impossible not to clock the more diffuse, grayer daybreak that permeated the room in a soft, cool glow. It was lovely.

“Fucking fuck!”

There came a soft knock on his door. “Everything okay in there?” called the voice of Oliver’s mother. “Not that I don’t appreciate some early morning profanity.”

Oliver leapt out of bed as if he had been scalded, pressing himself into a corner and glaring warily about. The room was a mess. Clothes were strewn everywhere. A mostly-empty handle of vodka perched on the edge of the bed. A rank odor of sweat and something grosser–could it be vomit?–filled the space, and there was a dark stain of something–could it be blood?–on the pillow.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Oliver hissed.

“What was that?” his mother asked politely from outside. 

“Nothing!” he yelled. “Go away!”

“Sure,” she said agreeably. “If you need anything, I’m right outside!”

Why was she being so nice? Oliver wracked his brain. What had he done yesterday? Had she witnessed him going off the rails and was worried for his health and wellbeing? Or had he–miracle of miracles–managed to contain his self-destructive behavior to his own bedroom?

He put a hand to his forehead as a wave of pain suddenly washed over him. Goddamn. He hadn’t had a hangover in…well, ever, actually. He felt almost seasick, his head light and filled with tumbleweeds. Even the soft light through the curtains was enough to make him wince, and he couldn’t remember the specifics of the day before with any certainty.

That meant he’d have to face his mother in the dark about what, if anything, he needed to apologize for. And with a pounding headache. And after five hundred and sixty-three of the weirdest days of his life.

All of which brought him back to one, inevitable conclusion.

“Fuck.”

**

Yesterday

Two days ago, which was also almost two years ago, Oliver Santos had not been the type of person to fall asleep drunk and half-naked after bleeding onto his pillow. He had not been the type of person to yell curse words through the door at his mother while nursing an alcohol-induced headache. He had been more the type of person to sit quietly in his room (albeit still with the door closed), finishing his homework, and then reading or playing video games until he hit the hay at ten p.m.

In the morning, he would wake up two or three minutes before his alarm went off, brush futilely at his cowlick a few dozen times, and head downstairs, where his mother would make them both toast with raspberry jam and tell him about her night. She was a nurse and had been stuck on night shift for as long as Oliver could remember, which meant that as he was getting ready for his day, her (much more arduous) one was drawing to a close.

“Luckily,” his mother always said, “toast with raspberry jam is an excellent breakfast or dinner.”

Oliver would eat one and a half pieces of his toast while shuddering at his mother’s graphic tales of maternity ward emergencies, wrap up the final half piece of toast in a napkin, and eat it on his way to the bus stop, wiping crumbs off his lip just as the hulking gray behemoth squealed to reluctant stop at the curb, its doors limping open to admit Oliver and the motley assortment of morning commuters.

After a 23-minute bus ride, during which Oliver would listen to the debut album of his favorite band (or, if he was feeling frisky, the debut album of his second favorite band), the same bus would deposit him unceremoniously in front of the main building of Columbus Community College, where Oliver would spend the next seven or eight hours attending classes or finding quiet corners to do his homework.

Then, he would take a different bus (just as hulking, just as much a behemoth, but marginally less gray) home, microwave a frozen dinner from Trader Joe’s, say goodbye to his mother as she left for her shift, and do the rest of his homework. If he had finished it on campus, he sometimes tried to get ahead on the next week’s assignments.

Classes at Columbus Community College were not necessarily the most intellectually stimulating, but, Oliver thought practically, they got the job done. If “the job” was granting him credits towards a degree while allowing him plenty of time to play Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch he had purchased with the money he saved by not attending one of the out-of-state, four-year colleges his mother had bullied (“highly encouraged”) him into applying to.

He hadn’t seen the point. “I like it here,” he said.

“But what if one of these other schools has a major you’re interested in?” his mother had argued. “You might have a lot of fun!”

But Oliver couldn’t think of a single major that would be more interesting than his daily rituals of raspberry toast and recreation. In fact, if left to his own devices, he wouldn’t be attending school at all. But to even broach the idea would have crushed his mother, so he dutifully sat through lecture after lecture and completed each boring assignment with diligence, if not any particular intellectual fervor.

His mother, like most adults he had encountered in high school and even earlier, seemed inordinately fixated on his future. But the future had always seemed nebulous and unclear to Oliver, who had a hard time visualizing what his life could look like if any meaningful aspect of it were different. He had never understood what his classmates meant when they said they could “see themselves” as veterinarians or firefighters or social media influencers or whatever. Did they literally see a picture of themselves dressed in lab coats or Hazmat suits or name-brand products, hovering behind their eyeballs? He couldn’t “see himself” as anything other than exactly what he was, and, frankly, didn’t see the need to try. This philosophy, he quickly learned, confused and upset those to whom he explained it. So eventually he stopped explaining it.

In the rare moments he felt prone towards psychoanalysis, he would realize that his mother’s fixation on his future was likely a byproduct of her own fast-paced life. She had had Oliver when she was sixteen, meaning that her “future” arrived quite a bit faster than she had intended it to. Being forced to live in the future, he reasoned, naturally made her want him to join her there as soon as possible.

But the present got a bad rap, as far as he was concerned. He had no quibble with the status quo.

So, as a person who already lived most of his days in a very similar way, Oliver was more than a little taken aback when he was cosmically Groundhog Day’d.

He didn’t live under a rock. He was familiar with Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, and the variety of other pop culture artifacts that depicted time loops. He wasn’t even altogether shocked to learn that such a phenomenon was real. There were many inexplicable things about the world around him, and he was perfectly happy to add time looping to the list.

But why would it happen to him? He wasn’t mean, like Bill Murray, or nihilistic, like Andy Samberg. For the first several days of his sentence he racked his brain, hoping to identify the lesson he needed to learn quickly so he could get it over with and progress into tomorrow, but kept coming up empty. Every day, he woke up with the sun slanting through the window at the exact same angle, the same bird chirping the same tune, his mother greeting him with the exact same words, and the exact same (unfortunately very boring) lecture about algebraic equations in his morning math class. He rode the bus with the same businessman who made the same joke about “Tuesday blues-day” and the same bus driver who rolled his eyes, like clockwork, every time he cracked it.

At first, he was confused and vaguely alarmed. This was certainly an unusual, if not absolutely unique, problem to have. What if the time loop never ended? What if there was a version of him outside the time loop, moving on with his life and behaving in ways Oliver wouldn’t approve of? Or what if he had suffered some kind of mental breakdown and was actually trapped in a psych ward while his mother fretted outside the bulletproof glass?

This simply won’t do, he decided. If there was a lesson to be learned or personal growth to undergo, he would pull a full-on Ebenezer. After a few more minutes of Animal Crossing.

**

Today

Oliver sniffed his armpit nervously. Not because he suspected his armpit was the foulest-smelling part of him (it looked relatively vomit-free), but because it was readily within reach. Ehh. It would do, as long as his mother didn’t get too close. Yesterday she had swooped in for a quick kiss on the head, but (and here he really had to rack his brain to remember back that far) she hadn’t done that the day before and didn’t make a regular habit of it. 

He considered sneaking out the window to avoid her entirely, but he was desperate for an ibuprofen to relieve his pounding headache, and didn’t trust his own agility on the steeply slanted roof. Maybe he could just hide in his room until she left? Goodness knows he had done that plenty of times over the past two years. 

But he was starving, and, if he was honest with himself, desperate to see more of the world of today beyond his bedroom. So after cleaning himself up as best he could, he opened the door and crept nervously downstairs to the kitchen.

The scene reminded him forcibly of one of the games he used to play as a kid–the puzzles that asked him to spot the ten differences between two seemingly identical pictures. It was a normal morning in his normal kitchen–but it was also, in so many ways, not. The morning paper was open to sports rather than obituaries. The temperature was one or two degrees cooler, with a window cracked open to circulate a soft summer breeze. His mother was in her bathrobe, rather than scrubs.

She plopped two pieces of slightly burnt toast onto a plate and turned to carry it to the table, catching sight of him in the doorway.

“Oh!” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming down.”

Pretty good, how about you? Oliver almost replied, his standard response to her standard “Morning honey, how did you sleep”? for the past two years. Any more appropriate reply froze in his throat and he just stared at her.

“Oliver.” She put down the plate and looked at him seriously. “I really think we should talk.”

“I have to go to class,” he said, not at all prepared for a heart-to-heart so soon after becoming unlooped.

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh? You changed your mind?”

He racked his brain. Why, oh why, did he have to drink so much yesterday? He couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had said to her. He must’ve implied he wasn’t returning to school.

“Uh, I guess?”

In truth he had no desire to return to school, but his desire to avoid this conversation took temporary precedence.

His mother clearly wasn’t sure how to respond. “Okay…great!” She smiled. “I’m really happy to hear that.”

He tried to move casually towards the medicine cabinet.

“But I still think we should talk,” she continued.

“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, rooting around for the ibuprofen. “We will for sure.”

“After you get back from class?”

He tried to think, but his brain was so foggy. “Won’t you be asleep?”

She blinked at him. “Well, no…I was thinking I’d call in sick tonight.”

“Oh.” He nodded confidently as if he knew the reason for her decision. “Right.”

They looked at each other in polite confusion. He popped three pills into his mouth and gulped them down dry, then gestured to the plate of toast.

“Is that for me?”

“Sure,” she said happily. Whatever had happened, she was clearly pleased that he was acting normal…ish. 

“I’m running late.” He grabbed both pieces of toast, wrapped them in a napkin, and practically bolted for the exit. “See you later.” And before she had time to reply, he was out the door.

**

Yesterday

A month into his sentence, Oliver was getting pretty pissed.

“Oh come on,” he groaned as he woke up to the usual morning. “Give me a break already!” He shouted this last bit to the heavens, as if the louder he spoke, the quicker the cosmic lesson would be delivered.

“What was that?” his mother called from downstairs. He didn’t reply. It didn’t matter if she was confused. It didn’t matter if she was anything at all, since she would forget about it by midnight anyway.

He threw himself out of bed and kicked the wall angrily. Red-hot pain burst into his foot. “Ow!” he yelled through gritted teeth. He threw open a window and glared up at the sky. “I’m wide open!” he called, flinging his arms out to demonstrate. “Hit me with it!”

Nothing, of course, happened.

Oliver enjoyed the sameness of his days, but there was a difference between days that were similar and the exact same day, over and over again. If he had to pretend to chuckle at “Tuesday blues-day” one more time, he was liable to kill someone, and then himself. After the first few days, he felt confident in his mastery of algebra and had given up going to class. But the appeal of tooling aimlessly around town had already worn off. It wasn’t that interesting of a town to tool around in, and Oliver couldn’t shake the feeling that he was wasting time that should be spent growing and developing as a person.

So for a week he had gone to the public library every day, making his way diligently through dense nonfiction books on a variety of topics. But he found none of them very interesting, and struggled to make the facts stick in his brain. More often than not, he read and reread the same page for hours, his eyes glazing over as his mind wandered.

The next week, he had determined to be altruistic. But everyday altruism was a lot harder than the movies made it seem. Most of the people he encountered seemed to be doing just fine, and weren’t in immediate need of help. Or if they were, they weren’t flaunting that need to random strangers. He had seen one woman crying on a street corner and approached her nervously, asking if he could buy her a coffee. She had stopped crying, glared at him suspiciously, and walked away without a word.

He had searched in vain for someone who, perhaps, would imminently be hit by a bus or have a heart attack, but had yet to find a suitable victim. For a wild moment at the end of that week he had wondered if he was supposed to engineer some kind of accident, just so he could save someone from it, but he quickly dismissed that idea as both ridiculous and logistically challenging.

Then he decided that if he couldn’t save a stranger, he could at least bring more joy to everyone in his life. But the problem was, there weren’t a ton of people in his life. Other than his mother, he spoke to very few. So he spent a week halfheartedly trying to bond with his classmates, but most were older and commuters who, like him, weren’t exactly thrilled to be spending their mornings learning algebra. They were perfectly polite, but no one seemed ready to leap into an intimate friendship. Plus, the fact that any progress he made was erased at the end of the day made forming friendships nigh impossible.

Perhaps this was the lesson he was meant to learn? That he should connect with more people and stop being lonely?

He pondered this dutifully, but the problem was, he just didn’t feel lonely. He was perfectly nice to everyone he met, and everyone he met was perfectly nice to him. He felt like he had a confidante in the form of his mother, and enjoyed his own company when he wasn’t in class. He had never felt the need for additional intimate relationships, and didn’t think anyone else had an unfillable gap in their life due to his not being their friend.

So having burned through academic, altruistic, and interpersonal self-improvement plans, he had progressed to the spiritual. All last week, he had gone to different church services in an attempt to commune seriously, for the first time in his life, with a higher power. He sat through a silent Quaker service and did his best to mentally run down his list of sins. Then he went to confession the next day and was theoretically absolved of all of them. He read the Bible (or at least the highlights), and took long walks during which he attempted to commune authentically with the beauty of the natural world (he got three tick bites, but they had of course all disappeared by the morning). By the end of the week, though, he had received no epiphanies and felt no stronger in spirit than he had before.

Which brought him to week four, when he lost his head completely, shouted at the sky, and broke his toe by kicking walls. At least he could say he was experimenting with a variety of strategies.

**

Today

The first thing Oliver did upon stumbling out into the brand-new world was almost get hit by a car. “Holy hell!” he screeched, but his exclamation was lost in the loud blare of the car horn.

“Get out of the road!” the driver yelled at him crossly. 

He had, in fact, stepped blindly out into the street without even looking, so used he was to yesterday’s traffic patterns. He sprang back to the safety of the sidewalk, heart pounding.

The air smelled different–thick and heavy with oncoming rain. Instead of the neighbor’s dog, whose bark he had heard reliably every morning for the past five hundred and sixty-three days, he heard the neighbor himself corralling his young children into the car to go to school. The light was different, the colors were different, the street was different, the people were different–Oliver sank into an awkward squat, momentarily overcome by the tiny, huge, difference all around him.

Was he different?

Surely he must be. Why else would he have been allowed out of the loop? Whatever lesson he was meant to learn, he must have learned it. Whatever growth he was meant to achieve, he must have achieved it. He must now be Oliver 2.0–a kinder, more adventurous, more adult Oliver. 

He took mental stock. He didn’t feel kinder, or more adventurous, or more adult, or really different at all. What exactly was he supposed to do now? Should he march triumphantly into his community college class and announce that he was transferring to an out-of-state university to pursue his lifelong dream of…this ambition fizzled out when he couldn’t bring to mind a suitable lifelong dream to announce. Should he run back inside, apologize to his mother for any hardship he had ever caused her, and swoop her off on a trip to Fiji? That’d be cool, but he definitely didn’t have the money to swoop anyone off anywhere, other than maybe on a day trip to Cincinnati–and even for that he’d need help with gas. Should he go throw himself into human connection and make a lifelong friend? He supposed he wouldn’t mind doing that, but no lifelong friend prospects seemed to be in the vicinity.

He looked up at the sky. What am I to do? he wanted to shout to the heavens, but he stopped himself in time, remembering that now, if people thought he was crazy, they’d actually remember it long enough to lock him up.

Still brainstorming, he took a bite of toast. Delicious, as usual. He and his mother both preferred their toast ever so slightly burnt, so it crunched satisfyingly when he bit down on it, and the cool jam contrasted nicely with the smoky bread.

Having no better ideas than going to class, he walked to the bus stop, munching his breakfast along the way.

**

Yesterday

Oliver was proud that it took him almost a whole year to reach the self-destructive habits that Bill Murray seemed to regress into almost immediately. Of course, he couldn’t give himself too much credit. The reason for the delay was less because of strong willpower or unshakeable values, and more because traditional modes of self-destructive behavior had never much appealed to Oliver.

He had tried beer when he was eighteen, mainly just to say he had sampled alcohol illicitly, but thought it tasted disgusting and didn’t particularly enjoy the way it fogged his brain. Drugs had never much interested him. He didn’t have what he would consider an addictive personality, so gambling or binge eating were off the table.

Still, he felt certain that he couldn’t begin his personal growth without first hitting rock bottom, so self-destructive behavior it was. He figured he might as well get an early start, so instead of going to his morning class, he found a 24/7 bar and walked nervously inside.

The place was almost completely deserted at that odd hour, and he had to wait several minutes before the bartender walked out of the kitchen.

“Oh!” he said in surprise. “Sorry, I didn’t know you came in. What can I get you?”

“A beer,” Oliver said confidently, but almost immediately regretted it. If the goal was efficient self-destruction, beer wasn’t the way to go. “Actually, make that a double vodka tonic.”

The bartender was too polite to raise an eyebrow or act surprised at this college student ordering hard liquor at nine in the morning. After checking his ID, he mixed Oliver’s drink and passed it over to him silently.

Bracing himself, Oliver chugged the whole thing. Disgusting.

He let his eyes wander around the bar as he waited for the alcohol to take effect. It was dingy, and sad, although he supposed it would be more vibrant later in the day when there were actual customers. He’d have to return to check it out.

Other than the acrid aftertaste, the drink didn’t seem to be doing much, so he ordered another one. After chugging that, he paid his bill and wandered outside, wondering what he should do next.

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray drove his car off a cliff or something, didn’t he? But Oliver didn’t have a car. If he did, he certainly wouldn’t ride the stinky bus every day. His mother had a car, but she needed it to go to work.

It took Oliver almost three weeks to realize that if he crashed his mother’s car, it would be ready to drive again as soon as the clock hit midnight.

To be fair, it may not have taken him this long if he had been in a better frame of mind for those three weeks. But every morning, he woke up and went to the bar, and the number of vodka tonics he could stomach was certainly increasing. He didn’t like the taste yet, exactly, but he had grown accustomed to it. Now, he stayed in the dark, cool bar for almost two hours, pounding back drink after drink, before stumbling out into the bright Columbus sunshine.

On the day he had the automotive Eureka moment, he had made his way through six vodka tonics and was struggling to walk in a straight line.

“Aha!” he said out loud, causing a passing pedestrian to glance at him in alarm. “I can wreck the car!” His speech was slightly slurred, but, he thought, the effect was all the better for it. Considerably cheered by the resolution of this problem, he returned home, doing his best to unlock the door quietly to avoid waking his mother. In his drunken state, he accidentally dropped her car keys, but she slept through the noise and he was able to ease his way out to the garage unimpeded.

He had his license, but he wasn’t a very good driver. He strongly suspected he had only passed his driving test because the instructor felt bad for him. Then again, poor driving skills would only work in his favor in this situation.

He pulled out of the garage and drove down the street. Where should he crash it? Surely not here, in a residential neighborhood where there might be children or dogs in the road? He had never killed someone in the time loop–he was fairly confident they’d spring back to life next time around, but he didn’t want to risk it, just in case.

He could crash into a building or other piece of infrastructure, he supposed. He made his way into the city, hoping no cop stopped him and made him take a Breathalyzer before he identified the ideal crash site. Although he could just try again tomorrow. If at first you don’t succeed, and all that.

He meandered through several streets, but couldn’t find a suitable, pedestrian-free area. “Quit stalling,” he told himself firmly. “The sooner you crash, the sooner you can learn from your mistakes.

Finally, he rolled the car gently into a light pole. It protested with a squeal and an anticlimactic crash. The window didn’t break, but the metal of the car hood crumpled a bit. 

He got out and surveyed the damage skeptically. Was it enough? Should he try it again? The pole was tilted slightly askew, but otherwise seemed to be in better shape than the car.

The proprietor of the nearby cafe came running out. “Are you all right?” she shouted. “Oh my God!”

He gazed at her blearily. “‘S fine,” he said. “It didn’t even really crash.”

She surveyed him, taking in his drunkenness. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Don’t do that.”

But she had already pulled out her phone and was taking pictures of the car and license plate. Now, if he took it to try to crash it somewhere else, the cops would track him down. He started speed-walking away, leaving the car where it was.

“Hey!” the cafe owner called after him. “Wait a second!”

But he broke into an awkward run, turned the corner, and disappeared from view.

**

Today

Oliver had gotten quite out of the habit of going to class, so he felt a bit awkward as he sidled into “Ancient Civilizations and Their Discontents” and slid into his normal chair towards the back of the room. He almost expected his classmates to give him weird looks–he hadn’t seen them in almost two years, after all–but then, of course, for them, it had only been two days.

And, indeed, no one paid him any attention at all, including the professor, a stooped, miserable-looking man who, if he lacked first-hand knowledge of ancient civilizations, certainly knew his way around a discontent.

As he launched into a slide deck on Mayan were-jaguars, Oliver couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. What had happened yesterday? He didn’t remember having a heart-to-heart with his mother, but it must have been fairly serious if she skipped her shift that night. He also didn’t remember drinking that much, but the vomit encrusting his bedsheets indicated that he must have.

After five hundred and sixty-three days of time loop, it was hard to distinguish any one day from the rest. But then again, he thought irritably, that was adult life for you–most people he knew struggled to remember the day of the week. He at least had his Groundhog Day experience as an excuse.

“Shit!” he heard a whispered curse from the desk in front of him and blinked out of his reverie. Malcolm, a fellow student whom he knew vaguely by sight, was poking futilely at a clearly dead laptop. As the professor droned on, Malcolm scrambled in his bag to look for a charger. “Shit!” he said again.

Oliver looked at the laptop. It seemed to be a generic PC similar to his own.

“Need this?” he offered his own charger to Malcolm, who spun around in his chair.

“Thank you!” he whispered fervently, plugging it in. “I hate taking notes by hand.”

“No problem.” Oliver certainly wasn’t planning on taking any notes. He resented having to take “Ancient Civilizations and Their Discontents,” feeling like it was a bit grandiose for a community college course. And whatever his job ended up being, he highly doubted he would need to speak knowledgeably about Mayan were-jaguars at a moment’s notice.

After class, Malcolm handed back his charger. “Thanks again,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Hey, you’re in Wystram’s algebra class too, right?”

“Yep.” Unfortunately.

“Finished the homework from yesterday yet?”

Oliver had finished the homework from yesterday–about eighty times, in fact. 

“Anyway,” Malcolm continued, “I was going to get a coffee and muscle through it before my next class, want to join?”

Oliver considered the offer. He didn’t drink coffee, nor was he especially interested in helping a stranger with a task he himself had already completed. “I can’t, but thanks.”

“Oh, sure, no worries. Maybe next time.” Malcolm grinned at him before swinging his heavy backpack onto his shoulder and leaving Oliver alone, to once again ponder the mysteries of yesterday.

**

Yesterday

After self-destruction came nihilism, Oliver was fairly certain. It wasn’t spelled out quite so clearly in Groundhog Day, but he thought his best bet was to cultivate a depressed cynicism about the uninspiring and inescapable world around him.

He kept drinking, mainly because by this point he had acquired a bit of a taste for it, but did not make another attempt to wreck the car. Instead, he hung about the house listlessly, sometimes not leaving his room for the entire day.

His mother was clearly worried about him, and would try to entice him out with offers of dinner, a movie night, a walk, or other activities he used to enjoy.

“Oliver?” she called in through his door after she had woken up at around 4 p.m. “I saw a red-breasted swallow down by the river the other day. Want to walk down and see if we can find the nest?”

Ordinarily, Oliver would have happily accepted this offer. He knew it was a bit nerdy, but he loved looking at birds and was quite good at identifying their species and gender by sight. But he had already drunk three vodka tonics that afternoon, and was worried his mother would smell alcohol on him. Plus, it didn’t seem appropriately nihilistic to enjoy bird-watching, so he just groaned something unintelligible, turned on his side, and buried his face in the pillow.

He got bored with nihilism pretty quickly–it was much less fun, he found, than his self-destructive phase, and no more edifying. What happened next? The only other significant plot point he could identify (and he spent at least a solid week watching Groundhog Day over and over again until he had every line memorized) was romantic love. But as the movie itself indicated, it seemed awfully difficult to spark genuine romantic connection in the span of a single day.

Still, he felt obligated to try. For a whole two months, he got out of bed dutifully every morning, drank a vodka tonic to fortify himself, and then went to a coffee shop, bookstore, park bench, or other venue with sufficient meet-cute potential. He combed his cowlick carefully and dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks. When that didn’t work, he wore his hair in a rat’s nest and slouched into sweatpants and a stained tee. When that didn’t work either, he gave up and wore his normal clothes. 

He tried pickup line after pickup line. The first few mornings, he couldn’t get through them without blushing furiously, but after a few weeks, he was slinging cheesy one-liners like a pro.

His improved confidence did not, however, correspond with increased success. Most of his prospective targets just gave him disgusted looks or ignored him completely. After a while, he changed his tack, attempting to engage them in serious conversation about interesting topics. He found, though, that people in coffee shops, bookstores, or park benches rarely wanted to engage in serious conversations with strangers, so he eventually had to admit defeat on that strategy as well.

When he was honest with himself, he could admit that his heart wasn’t really in it. He had never felt the pang of loneliness, or a particular desire for romantic connection. Dating seemed uniquely unappealing: the social pressure to behave a certain way or spend a certain amount of time together, the financial burden of the inevitable movie tickets, fancy dinners, or ice skating excursions–he supposed he wouldn’t mind dating someone if all “dating” meant was occasionally getting together to watch a movie at home or eat toast or play some video games, but most people had higher expectations of their significant other than he could confidently fulfill.

Anyway, whether it was through lack of interest or, more likely, lack of romantic appeal, Oliver had no luck finding his Andie MacDowell. By the time he accepted that, he had been living the same day for a year and a half.

**

Today

It came to him in an alarming instant. “Shit!” he actually said out loud, although he immediately regretted it. He was on the bus going home from class. And if there was anything he had learned from regular bus commutes, it’s that one should behave as normally as possible. On public transportation, abnormal is just one tiny step away from alarming.

A few people glanced his way and he ducked his head, but his mind was still racing. He had had a flash of memory, sparked by nothing in particular. He had stumbled into the house in the early afternoon, fairly drunk, and gone into his mother’s darkened bedroom. She was sleeping, but he remembered the urgent need to wake her up and tell her something. What was it? What was he prepared to confess?

Had he told her he was giving up on school? Had he confided in her that he had been living the same day for almost two years? Had he expressed anger that he didn’t really feel about her restrictive work schedule? Try as he might, the only thing he could conjure to mind was the image of pushing open her door and calling “Mom?” in a somewhat slurred voice.

Whatever it was, it had made her decide not to go to work that night. He was torn between wanting to race home and ask her what had happened, fully prepared to apologize for whatever silly words might have come out of his drunken mouth, and wanting to never go home again. Before he could decide, the bus squealed to his stop.

Get off or stay on? He had only a few moments to choose before the doors swung shut again.

**

Yesterday

Well. He had put it off long enough. He had tried everything else he could think of–every other way to grow and develop as a person–and none of it had gotten him unstuck. He was left with the one thing he least wanted to do: find a career that would satisfy his very soul, leaving him existentially fulfilled and allowing him to live the rest of his days as a happy and productive member of society.

None of that sounded like fun to Oliver.

He had a complicated relationship with careers. Like all his peers, he had been put through the usual battery of career aptitude tests in his elementary and middle school years. The results were all uninspiring, the tests asking mundane questions like “Do you prefer to work with numbers or words?” before spitting out mundane answers like “Congratulations–your affinity with words makes you ideally suited for a career involving words!” None of the proposed careers had ever struck him as all that interesting. Certainly not interesting enough to spend eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and some godforsaken number of years doing it. He had gotten so sick of the inevitable “What do you want to be when you grow up?” questions that instead of answering honestly with “I have no idea” (which made adults uncomfortable and usually prompted them to recommend another litany of uninteresting career options), he had started lying. “I want to be a farmer,” he would tell one teacher. “Definitely a business consultant,” he would profess to his neighbor. “I’ve got a lifelong desire to pursue aerospace engineering,” he would admit to his aunt, almost tearful in the depths of his passion for a dream job he had never so much as considered applying for.

“Good for you!” they would all say. “That sounds just right for you.”

If he gave such different answers every time, how could they all be just right for him? He was beginning to believe that the idea of a “dream job” was invented by unhappy adults who refused to accept that the careers they had worked their whole lives to possess were not, in fact, an instant ticket to happiness and success. 

There was just nothing much that he loved doing. But then again, there was nothing much that he hated doing, either. He was sure that he would stumble his way into some boring job with a middling income that would allow him enough spending money for his toast and raspberry jam and the occasional day trip with his mother. He would sit through his daily eight hours, doing some work but not too much, and then he would log off and go home and play video games. This future didn’t strike him as all that terrible.

But clearly, Bill Murray and the Groundhog Day gods disagreed, and so, bereft of any other options, he spent a miserable few months devoting himself to finding a dream job.

He wandered into a mechanic’s shop and somehow persuaded the guys on duty to let him shadow them for the day. He walked out nine hours later with grease-stained clothes and marginally more knowledge about spark plugs, but nothing more.

He went to the hospital where his mom worked and watched the doctors rushing in and out of rooms in their scrubs, trying to imagine himself as one of them. But when he thought of putting on the silly little hair hat, he felt no sudden spark of professional satisfaction.

He briefly toyed with the idea of being a so-called “Creative,” and took a heroic stab at writing a novel. The problem was, all his progress was erased at the end of every day, so he never made it very far. Although the real problem was that he just didn’t like doing it very much. He didn’t have any opposition to books or reading, but he didn’t enjoy the experience of crafting characters or thinking through a complex plot. And if there were plenty of other people who did, and could do it way better than him, who was he to throw his hat in the ring?

He had nothing whatsoever in the way of artistic or musical talent, but he gamely spent a week trying to learn the piano anyway, only giving up when the woman at the music shop started popping Advil because his poor playing was giving her a headache.

After two months, he was no closer to a dream career than he had been before. If only he could win the lottery and not have to work–although he supposed this mindset was not very self-actualized of him. One day, he skipped class and stayed with his mother at the breakfast table.

“Class got canceled,” he lied. “Professor was sick.”

“Oh, that’s too bad!” she said, spooning an extra glob of raspberry jam onto her toast. “But we can have a fun day together here.”

She looked exhausted, but smiled up at him brightly anyway.

“No, no, you should rest,” he said hurriedly. “I did want to ask you, though…” he trailed off, wondering how to phrase the question without offending her. “Is it worth it? Your job, I mean? You definitely miss a lot of sleep doing it.”

She paused for a second before answering. “It’s worth it to have a steady income. It’s worth it to have a defined schedule, even if the hours are challenging, so I can spend time with you in the mornings and evenings.”

“But do you like actually being a nurse?”

“There are parts of it I like. Some of the patients are really lovely. I enjoy feeling like I’ve helped them through a tough time.”

“But there are parts of it you don’t?”

She shrugged. “There are bad parts of every job. You just have to find the job with the most palatable bad parts.”

He nodded, but still wasn’t sure she had answered the question. Was it worth it? Was the fulfillment you could derive from your job ever worth the hours you put into it? Was it ever worth the opportunity cost of the naps you could have been taking, or the toast you could have been eating with your son?

But it didn’t seem fair to continue pressing her. After all, if Oliver didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, why would she? Just because she was an adult didn’t necessarily mean she had it all figured out. She hadn’t even had a Groundhog Day time loop experience to teach her these valuable lessons.

The next day, which of course wasn’t the next day at all, Oliver didn’t explore a new career path. He drank his vodka tonics, played some video games, and went back to bed. It was the best day he’d had in weeks.

**

Today

He got off the bus. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and plus, the time loop had made him miss his mom. Yes, he saw her every day, but he saw her doing and saying the exact same things every day. He missed being surprised by her. He missed her having the freedom to move forward.

Plus, he was just dying to know what had happened yesterday.

She was clearly home when he pushed open the front door. Music was playing softly, and a halfway-completed puzzle was strewn over the living room floor. She always professed to like puzzles, but would get frustrated with them partway through and give up. When he called her on it, she would insist that she planned to imminently complete it, but it would lie on the floor for weeks until Oliver finally took pity on her and finished it himself.

“Mom?” he called.

“In here!” her voice came from the kitchen. He dumped his backpack on the floor and went in, finding her sipping tea at the table and reading a book. He sat down next to her.

“How was class?”

“It was fine. The Mayans were really into jaguars.”

“Well, they had excellent taste.”

“Did you get any sleep?”

“I took a nap earlier. But I wanted to get a jump start on this puzzle.” Oliver rolled his eyes. “No, really, I did!”

“If you say so.”

She sipped her tea, fortifying herself. “Oliver, honey, about yesterday…”

“Can we just forget yesterday ever happened?” He was suddenly nervous. Whatever he had said, he hadn’t meant it. Whatever drunken outburst he had made, it had been just that–a drunken outburst. There was truly no great epiphany he needed to get off his chest, no deeply hidden trauma that needed to explode out into the world.

His mother raised her eyebrows in surprise. “No, I don’t think we can.”

“Oh.”

“Now, I know you’re of legal age, but I’m just not comfortable with you drinking that much while you still live at home. Especially on a school day! I’m happy you were able to get yourself to class today, but sweetie, this is not a habit you want to start, I promise.”

Shit. So she had seen him in his drunken state. He probably should start laying off the vodka tonics. Good thing he didn’t have an addictive personality.

“Sorry, Mom. Yesterday was…a weird day.”

She folded both of his hands in hers. “No, it’s okay, I’m glad we were able to have an honest conversation.”

“Right, about that…” An honest conversation about what?

“You know you can always tell me or ask me anything, right?”

Could she be any vaguer?

“Yes, I know that.”

To his enormous distress, a tear leaked out of the corner of her eye. Good Bill Murray in heaven, what horrible thing had he said to her?

“Mom, don’t cry!”

“I’m not!” she said defiantly, and chuckled a little. “I just love you so much.”

“I love you too.”

“And I’m just so happy that you’re happy.”

“That I’m–” he paused. “Wait, what?”

She blinked at him. “You know. That you’re so happy with your life. You’ve always seemed happy, but every mother worries, you know. And I hope you’ve never felt like I wasn’t happy with exactly who you are.”

HIs mind was reeling, trying to make sense of the pieced-together conversation that was starting to take shape. 

“I just want what’s best for you, whether that’s college, or staying home forever, or anything else you want.”

“Uh…thanks?”

“And it just means a lot to hear you say that you’re on the right track, that you’re living the life you want to live.”

“…I am?”

But as Oliver thought about it, he agreed with his drunken confession of yesterday. He was happy with the status quo. In fact, he’d had five hundred and sixty-three days to fix problems that, he’d learned, didn’t exist in the first place.

“But still,”  his mother grew stern. “As happy as I am to hear that you’re happy, I don’t like this drinking habit. We’re going to have to talk seriously about this.”

He grinned, a huge weight suddenly off his mind. There was no grand confession to atone for after all. “Okay.”

She glared at him suspiciously. “Okay?”

“Sure. Let’s talk about it tomorrow at breakfast.”

“Okay.” She stood up and came around the table to give him a one-armed hug. “I love you, baby.”

“Love you too.”

He stood up, wondering what to do next. He had a bit of homework he could do. But Animal Crossing was calling his name from upstairs…

Just one hour of playing, he decided. Then he’d either do homework or help his mom finish the puzzle.

As he headed to his room, he thought about the conversation he’d just agreed to have the next day. It won’t be too terrible, he thought to himself. She’ll understand.

In fact, he was rather looking forward to tomorrow. His toast with raspberry jam would be delicious.