Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I’m scared that I will never do anything of value with my life.

my ever-growing sense that I don’t belong where I am, fueled by the hope that maybe there is, in fact, a place I do belong,

It’s always my impulse to ignore the bad, to run toward the good.

I was admitting it to her at the same rate I was admitting it to myself.

The first time I had sex, I made love.

just how unsubtle my feelings are.

Life is long and full of an infinite number of decisions.

I lost a baby I didn’t know existed. I lost a baby I was not planning for and did not want. How do you mourn something like that? How do you mourn something you never knew you had? Something you never wanted but something real, something important.

living in a cocoon of warm bodies and takeout.

The difference between life and death could be as simple and as uncomfortably slight as a step you take in either direction.

Which means that I am here today, alive today, because I made the right choices, however brief and insignificant they felt at the time. I made the right choices.

How we grab on to facts and consequences looking to blame or exonerate ourselves?

There is a force out there, call it what you will. I happen to believe that it’s God,” she says. “But it pushes us in the right direction, keeps us on the right path.

You’re trying too hard to find the perfect answer when an answer will do.”

Because that is truly all I want in this world. I want to try to do something myself, knowing that when I have nothing left, someone will take me the rest of the way.

“We can both just hate them for as long as we need to, and then, one day, when we feel stronger, we’ll probably forgive them for being imperfect, for doing a terrible thing.

And part of loving someone, part of being the recipient of trust, is telling the truth even when it’s awful.

“I think as long as you’re happy and you’re doing something good with your life, it really doesn’t matter whether you went out and found the perfect thing or you chose what you knew you could make work for you.”

If everything that happens in the world is just a result of chance and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, that’s just too chaotic for me to handle.

When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too.

I think that through our wallowing, we are able to release some of our fear and pain, because when we wake up the next day, we both feel stronger, better, more ready to take on the world, no matter what it throws at us.

“You’re Hannah Martin. Your weakest moment is a strong moment.

“Well, you never know what you’re ready for until you have to face it,”

Maybe this is the middle of a longer love story.”

I don’t believe that being in love absolves you of anything. I no longer believe that all’s fair in love and war. I’d go so far as to say your actions in love are not an exception to who you are. They are, in fact, the very definition of who you are.

Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I’m starting to think that when we don’t own them, we don’t own ourselves.

If I hadn’t just been in a car accident where I almost lost my life, maybe I’d be hurt by something as small as a sentence.

You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.

Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.

It shades everything you do.

That’s what you do when you want something. You don’t look for reasons why it won’t work. You look for reasons why it will.

It never occurred to me that you have to hold those things sacred.”

Relationships aren’t neat and clean. They’re ugly and messy, and they make almost no sense except to the two people in them.

Occasionally, I’ll be doing something completely arbitrary, like taking a shower or driving home, and I’ll think about it, the baby.

“And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”