Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I’m not scared of flying. I’m scared of sharks, hurricanes, and false imprisonment. I’m scared that I will never do anything of value with my life. But I’m not scared of flying.

And I do. Because I am alive. I may be broken and scared. But I am alive.

Forget elliot we LOVE HENRY ETHAN sorry

You don’t need to find the perfect thing all the time. Just find one that works, and go with it. If you had, we’d be on to favorite colors by now.”

“I think as long as you’re happy and you’re doing something good with your life, it really doesn’t matter whether you went out and found the perfect thing or you chose what you knew you could make work for you.”

What I believe to be fated seems to fall perfectly in line with what I want to be true at any given moment. But I think that’s OK. I think that’s hope. “It’s messy,” I tell him. “You said earlier that it’s messy, and you’re right. It’s messy.” “Messy is OK,” he says. “Right? We can do messy.”

“And I was reading about different theories about the universe. 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. This is completely plausible, by the way. It’s a legitimate interpretation of quantum mechanics. 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. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices that led me somewhere else, led me to someone else.” He looks at Gabby. “And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”

If there are an infinite number of universes, I don’t know how I got so lucky as to end up in this one. Maybe there are other lives for me out there, but I can’t imagine being as happy in any of them as I am right now, today. I have to think that while I may exist in other universes, none is as good as this.