Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“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.

It’s sort of absurd, isn’t it? How we grab on to facts and consequences looking to blame or exonerate ourselves?

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.

If you believe in fate, if you believe something is pushing you toward your destiny, that would include the person you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with.

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.

I love him. And I think I have always loved him. And I’m going to lose him. And just for tonight, I want to experience how it feels to be his, to be loved by him, to believe that this is the beginning of something. Because I’m pretty sure it’s the end.

But sometimes you can’t help but show the things you feel. Sometimes, despite how hard you try to fight your feelings, they show up in the glassiness of your eyes, the downward turn of your lips, the shakiness of your voice, and the lump in your throat.

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.

“But if he turns you down, he’s such a massive idiot that I’m pretty sure you’ll have dodged a bullet.” “That doesn’t make me feel better.” She shrugs. “Sometimes the truth doesn’t,” she says. “Now, go.”

If I’m meant to find him, I’ll find him. I guess I do believe that. But sometimes I wish I got to decide what I was meant to do.

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.

“That love makes you do crazy things, that sometimes you have to do things that seem wrong from the outside but you know are right.

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

I’m not moving to London. I’m staying right here. I found my home. And it’s not New York or Seattle or London or even Los Angeles. It’s Gabby.

“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.”

“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. The future is so incredibly unpredictable that trying to plan for it is like studying for a test you’ll never take.

So I’m just going to focus on what I want and need right now and trust that the future will take care of itself.”

“Timing seems like an excuse. 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. You should be prepared to take them as they are and deal with the consequences. Relationships aren’t neat and clean. They’re ugly and messy, and they make almost no sense except to the two people in them. That’s what I think. I think if you truly love someone, you accept the circumstances; you don’t hide behind them.”

When you almost lose your life, it makes you want to double down, to do something important and bigger than yourself.

I was really taken with this one theory that states that everything that is possible happens. That means that when you flip a quarter, it doesn’t come down heads or tails. It comes up heads and tails. 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. This is happening every second of every day. The world is splitting further and further into an infinite number of parallel universes where everything that could happen is happening.

It’s entirely possible that every time we make a decision, there is a version of us out there somewhere who made a different choice. An infinite number of versions of ourselves are living out the consequences of every single possibility in our lives.

“Well, I’m sure I’ll be seeing you,” I say. “Some way or another.” “Yeah,” he says. “Or maybe in another life.”

“Maybe in another life,”