Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

Life is long and full of an infinite number of decisions. I have to think that the small ones don’t matter, that I’ll end up where I need to end up no matter what I do.

I don’t want to believe what a person says and ignore what he does. I don’t want to see only what I want to see.

“It hurts so bad. Deep in my gut, it hurts.”

“I know that you’ve always been searching for something, yeah,” Gabby says. “I always assumed you’d know it when you found it.”

What do you do when you have to do something you can’t do?

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.

“Because you are the kind of person who deserves a fuss made over her. That’s why. And

So I stayed with him because… I didn’t really see a reason not to. We were comfortable around each other. We were happy enough.

I was happy enough.

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

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.

She says it as if she is heartbroken that her worst fears came true right in front of her very eyes.

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.

It shades everything you do. You have to talk about it, even when you aren’t talking about it.

“Because if I’m not his soul mate, then that means he’s not mine. There’s someone else out there for me. If he found his, maybe I’ll find my own.”

If you love someone, if you think you could make them happy for the rest of your life together, then nothing should stop you.

I have missed you every day since I last saw you. I’ve missed you for years.

But we love each other madly. I’m married to a man who became a father because he loved me and now loves me because I made him a father. And he makes me laugh.