Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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.

Women don’t need to be thin to be valuable.”

“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.”

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.

stop. I can see the mood change much the same way you can feel summer turn to fall. One day, everything’s sunny, and then, suddenly, it’s not.

I want to tell her that because I want her to be happy. But I also know it’s not true. And part of loving someone, part of being the recipient of trust, is telling the truth even when it’s awful.

“You have to decide what you will tolerate and what you can live with.

“Divide the pain in two,” I tell her. “And give half of it to me.”

Hearts are just like legs, I guess. They mend.

“But this is the way life has worked out. And I’m embracing it.”

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.

He says he loves me, but he’s not sure he was ever in love with me. And that he’s sorry he wasn’t brave enough to face that fact earlier.”

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.

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.”

But then it all clicked into place, and I understood that my marriage failed the first time because I picked the wrong person.

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.

“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.

I have to think that while I may exist in other universes, none is as good as this.