If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

But now I feel as though the whole world is out there waiting for me, just as long as I’m brave enough to go out and grab it.

How, Audrey thought, do you get to the end of your life and feel as though you’ve barely begun?

You can’t change others’ behavior. You can only control your own reaction to it.

It’s the greatest trick people play on themselves, allowing their fears to destroy their ambitions.”

Regret. It was such a powerful word, a word that implied the desire for an undoing.

Do you remember those choose-your-own-adventure books you used to read when you were little? Life is a bit like one of those, except in real life you can’t go back to the beginning and start again.”

Audrey had only been fifteen, but she had known songs like that were rare: songs that made you understand something you couldn’t otherwise articulate, something you could only feel and were a better person for having felt it.

“There’ll always be someone who disapproves of the choices you make. But as long as you understand the reasons for them, as long as you’re happy with them and no one’s unduly hurt by them, you need to be strong enough—brave enough—to make your own decisions.”

She sang note-perfect, her voice so much more confident than she had ever imagined it could be, and it was as though her sixteen-year-old self were holding her hand, singing alongside her, reminding her of all the things she had once hoped her life might be. There, in her voice, was the optimism she had once felt for the future, the plans she had once dared to make, the courage she had lost sight of for so many years and only now regained. Wrapped inside Audrey’s singing was all the love, the loss, the grief, and the guilt that she had been carrying inside her for almost thirty years.

And all at once Audrey understood that decades of unspoken stories were like strata of ancient rock: layer upon layer of family secrets impacting on one another until the truth was hidden so far beneath the surface that only the most committed could excavate it.

I want you to see that even when you’re convinced relationships are beyond repair, there’s always hope.”

“I know it’s hard. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But there’s always a chance of reconciliation. You just have to be honest enough to want it and brave enough to pursue it.”

moments of change were not an ending but a beginning: a chance for a different kind of life, a different kind of journey, a different form of happiness.

Because she was certain now that a person’s story didn’t follow a straight narrative trajectory from birth to death. There were countless beginnings and endings, countless opportunities to start again. There were as many different beginnings to a life as someone was brave and kind enough to allow themselves.