Some Other Time

by Angela Brown

And isn’t this just marriage? One person in the driver’s seat, the other person staring out the window, bouncing along, pleased to be enjoying the ride.

Life, Ellie now recognizes, is not a study in destiny but an experiment in choice, less a quirky romance novel about serendipity and more akin to those Choose Your Own Adventure books she loved to read as a kid. You make one decision and flip ahead twenty pages.

Divorce, Ellie recognizes, is strange. For years, you are intimately connected to a person—sharing everything from your medical history to your toilet to your groceries—and then one day you just drive away, even though in all reality only one of you likely knows how to get to the next place you’re going, and the other person is the only one who remembered to fill the car with gas.

He was every good adjective.

the idea of choices, as well as the ripples that result from each of them.

Or does she just go with it, like picking up a book you’re not sure you’ll like, but seeing it through to the end just to find out where it leads?

People change, and they don’t.

For the briefest of seconds, he closes his eyes—a broken compass stuck between two directions—

“Love stories are never about only two people,”

how can you ever really explain marriage or love or divorce to someone who isn’t steeped inside it?

For every new door we open in our lives, another one must remain closed. With each new choice we make, no matter how small it may seem at the time—to grab a coffee, to stay put a minute longer, to go home and sulk or not—we commit ourselves to a particular path. A certain destiny. And, often without ever realizing it, we commit all the people we love to this path, too.

Mothers are the gatekeepers of their children’s memories, the only people who know all of them—even the early ones their children themselves will never recall.

a mother’s love is not made from logic. It knows no boundaries. No limits.

this practiced instinct to let people know where you’re heading, which direction you hope to end up traveling.

people get all wrapped up in the notion that their life has to be so big, so earth shattering, that they forget how significant a simple and quiet life can be, too. How meaningful love and commitment are in such an unpredictable world.”

“Because in a world where everything is always changing, sweetheart,” Frank says, “where nothing is certain, sometimes it’s nice to have at least one thing that feels constant. To know that wherever you are in life, wherever your journey might take you, when you have this other person at your side, you’ll always feel like you’re at home.”

Love is not built on titles. Not on legal documents or diamond rings. It is built on the stories you create with a person. All those shared moments that ultimately turn into memories. Do you remember when . . . Remember that time we . .

Airports, she privately acknowledges, are unique places. Here, every minute matters. If you make a choice and turn up one moment later than intended, the door closes, the path you believed you were about to travel nixed, just like that.

Thirty-five thousand choices. There are so many opportunities every single day to open new doors and to close old ones. To walk the tightrope that divides free will and fate. To choose which version of your life you want to live.