Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I know that I should believe him. I know that he’s telling the truth. But the fact of the matter is that I worry that I’ll believe him too much, that I’ll become too easily swayed into believing what I want to believe about him. I don’t want to do what I would have done before. 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.

Time means nothing. Never is that more clear than in a hospital bed.

I moved to Los Angeles to put the past behind me, to move into the future. I moved to Los Angeles to change. And that’s what I’m going to do.

“We don’t know what would have happened. But whatever would have happened wasn’t supposed to happen.”

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.

“So I’m not going to go around worrying too much,” I tell her. “I’m just going to do my best and live under the assumption that if there are things in this life that we are supposed to do, if there are people in this world we are supposed to love, we’ll find them. In time.

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

Every time you flip a coin and it comes up heads, you are merely in the universe where the coin came up heads. There is another version of you out there, created the second the quarter flipped, who saw it come up tails.