Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.

She walked through another gate.

It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

She walked through another gate.

What was a gate anyway?

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn’t have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.