Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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.

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.

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.

It feels as if I never felt the chill of Boston in my hands or the wind of D.C. in my hair. As if I never felt the rain of Portland and Seattle on my shoulders or the heat of Austin on my skin. It’s as if New York City, and all of its disappointments, never entered my heart.

“And I was reading about different theories about the universe. I was really taken with this theory that some very credible physicists believe in called the multiverse theory. And it states that everything that is possible happens. That means that when you flip a quarter, it comes down heads and tails. Not heads or 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. 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. There are millions, trillions, or quadrillions, I guess, of different versions of ourselves living out the consequences of our choices. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they 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.”