Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I’m scared that I will never do anything of value with my life.

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

“Sometimes I worry I’ll never find a place to call home.”

It’s very easy to rationalize what you’re doing when you don’t know the faces and the names of the people you might hurt. It’s very easy to choose yourself over someone else when it’s an abstract.

I had been viewing the truth through my own little lens, one that was narrow and rose-colored.

Does it matter that once I faced the truth I behaved honorably? Does it matter that once I heard his wife’s voice, once I knew the names of his children, I never spoke to him again? Does it matter that I can see, clear as day, my own culpability and that I feel deep remorse? That a small part of me hates myself for relying on willful ignorance to justify what I suspected was wrong?

He still, all these years later, shines brighter to me than other people. Even after I got over him, I was never able to extinguish the fire completely, as if it’s a pilot light that will remain small and controlled but very much alive.

She raises her eyebrows at me. I roll my eyes at her. An entire conversation without a word spoken.

And then he leans over and kisses me on the cheek. The way it feels, his lips on my skin, makes me realize I have spent years looking for that feeling and never finding it. I have settled for casual flings, halfhearted love affairs, and a married man, searching for that moment when your heart jumps in your chest.

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.

My fate will find me.

Women don’t have to be thin to be valuable.

It is the teenage feelings that are the most intoxicating, the ones that have the power to render you helpless.

How do you mourn something like that? How do you mourn something you never knew you had? Something you never wanted but something real, something important.

I close my eyes and let the emotion wash over me. I listen to what my heart and mind are trying to tell me.

Talking isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I think I can talk just fine. But I don’t need to say anything else.

“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.”

Conversation takes more energy than I thought.

I am a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type of person. I am a see-where-life-takes-you sort of person. But that sort of approach to life isn’t yielding results for me.

I realize that simple and easy aren’t the same thing.

But I suppose just because something is hard to understand, that doesn’t make it any less true.

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.

I want to be realistic, for once. I want to be grounded. I want to ...