Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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.

When people are nice and sincere and they don’t fire back with smart-ass remarks, it makes my harmless sarcastic words seem downright rude.

“You can only muster up this type of courage a few times in your life. I’m just stupid enough to have it now. So help me into the damn wheelchair so I can go make a fool out of myself.”

“Do you think sometimes you can just tell about a person?” “Like you meet them and you think, this one isn’t like the rest of them, this one is something?”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.” She shrugs. “Sometimes the truth doesn’t,” she says.

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

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.

I made a mistake. And that mistake is part of what has led me to this moment. And while I neither regret nor condone what I did, I have learned from it. I have grown since. And I’m different now. You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.

When you are a freshman girl, you don’t understand what’s so unlikable about guys who are interested in freshman girls. Instead, I very much hoped he’d notice me. I wanted to be one of those girls. He’s now a shock jock on an FM station here.