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? This has nothing to do with him. I chose to go home with Gabby and Mark because that’s the choice I made. Nine billion choices I’ve made over the course of my life could have changed where I am right now and where I’m headed. There’s no sense focusing on just one. Unless you want to punish yourself.

Nine billion choices I’ve made over the course of my life could have changed where I am right now and where I’m headed. There’s no sense focusing on just one. Unless you want to punish yourself.

“I’m saying things happen for a reason. I’m saying there’s a point to this. I didn’t stick around with you that night because I wasn’t supposed to. That wasn’t what I was meant to do.”

“You think too much,” he says. “That’s your problem. You’re trying too hard to find the perfect answer when an answer will do.”

But I wonder how different my world would be if any of those things had happened. You can’t change just one part, can you? 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.

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.

“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.”