Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Try all you want, Hannah,” he says. “But there are no deal breakers here.”

“From experience, I can tell you that if you go around trying to figure out what’s fair in life or whether you deserve something or not, that’s a rabbit hole that is hard to climb out of.”

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.

In general, I find that when you are doing something you are not supposed to be doing, the best course of action is to act as if you are absolutely supposed to be doing it.

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.

Life is just a series of breaths in and out. All I really have to do in this world is

breathe in and then breathe out, in succession, until I die. I can do that. I can breathe in and out.

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. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. 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.

We have to face those consequences head-on, for better or worse. We don’t get to erase them just by saying we didn’t mean to. 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.

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

It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. 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.

And for the first time in my life, I know I have done everything right.

If there are an infinite number of universes, I don’t know how I got so lucky as to end up in this one. Maybe there are other lives for me out there, but I can’t imagine being as happy in any of them as I am right now, today. I have to think that while I may exist in other universes, none is as good as this.

know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they led me somewhere else, led me to someone else. And my heart

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