In Any Lifetime

by Marc Guggenheim

In a universe of infinite possibilities, the only constant is love. —Henri Thibault, PhD

What he craved was more substantial. He didn’t want or need a relationship or a long-term commitment—not that he would have resisted either—so much as hunger for a connection, the magnetic pull of another human being.

any woman would be lucky to have a man willing to search the world for her. Your wife has a man willing to search an infinite number of worlds.”

Fate and destiny aren’t phenomena that scientists care to traffic in, any more than faith and religion, but he’s found them to be as real as time, as immutable as gravity.

“I’ll always find you,” he said. “In any multitude. In any lifetime.” The promise felt like a vow.

Each note, each lyric, was a new promise not only to share her life with him but also to elevate his. She was daring him to be more than who he was. To live life at a brighter luminance. It must have been that something lovers call fate . . . It felt like fate. When they were together, there was no time. No past. No future. There was only now.

sometimes the hardest thing to do in life was just to live. It seemed impossible then. It feels impossible now. But having ruled out suicide, he has no other choice.

The truest freedom, she realized, is not to be aware of how free one is.

The existence of a multiverse was a hollow discovery without a world in which they were together.

“The only way I wake up with regret,” he said, “is if I wake up and you’re not there next to me.”

But as Jonas stares up at the woman he loves more than his own life, the two of them are the only two people who exist in the entire world. In the entire multiverse.

Jonas looks to the night sky and considers the stars in their multitude. Their light—hundreds, thousands of years old—winks down on him. For each one, he imagines a universe populated with an almost countless congregation of souls. He thinks of their lives and their deaths, their hopes and dreams, their crushing losses and disappointments. Some will die without ever having made a mark upon their world. Others will conjure breathtaking works of art—plays, songs, paintings, poems, symphonies—from nothing. Like Jonas, a select few will give birth to insights that will challenge their very perception of reality. All will experience the exquisite torture, the brutal blessing, of what it means to be human. Each of these lives is its own universe.