If Only I Could Tell You

by Hannah Beckerman

Scenes from family history now hummed in her head like Muzak in an elevator from which there was no escape. It was as though her mind, knowing it had so little future, had become obsessed with the past. Except there was no solace in looking back; she knew that. But sometimes it seemed to Audrey that she had forgotten all the things she wanted to remember, and remembered everything she wished she could forget.

But each of those scenarios demanded an impossible unraveling of her life. Because there would be no Jess at home, no Mia sitting opposite her. None of the past forty-four years as she’d known them would exist. And that was unthinkable: the untangling of a life back to a moment of critical decision. Audrey could never know where that other track might have led her, could never know what kind of a journey it might have taken her on. All she could know was the family she’d have needed to give up in order to find out.

“I don’t regret it, no. It’s not regret so much as melancholy, maybe. A mourning for alternative lives you can never know. 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.”

So much of what I thought I knew isn’t actually true. And if everything about your past changes, where does that leave who you are in the present?”

Jess realized that she had spent all these years being angry with Lily because it was easier to feel anger than it was to feel grief.

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.