Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

Does it matter that I can see, clear as day, my own culpability and that I feel deep remorse?

My life may be a little bit of a disaster.

I may not make the best decisions sometimes. But I am not going to lie here and stare at the ceiling, worrying the night away.

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.

“But looks aren’t the measure of a woman.”

“I’m embarrassed to admit that there have been times in my life when rejection from the woman I love has served only to encourage me sleeping with others.

I lost a baby I didn’t know existed. I lost a baby I was not planning for and did not want.

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.

“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.”

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

Something about that temporary and jarring loss of mobility can really encourage people to see what they are capable of.”

We had no claim on each other, made no promises.

Do you know how heartbroken I’d be to live in a world you weren’t in?”

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.

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.

Never should have left you.”

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.

“We don’t know what would have happened. But whatever would have happened wasn’t supposed to happen.”

You’re trying too hard to find the perfect answer when an answer will do.”

You don’t need to find the perfect thing all the time. Just find one that works, and go with

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.

Life is just a series of breaths in and out. All I really have to do in this world is breathe in and then breathe out, in succession, until I die. I can do that. I can breathe in and out.

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. Mark moves toward the

You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.

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.