"Do you ever think about the people you could have ended up with instead of me?"
I was sitting at the dining room table, and Mikey was in the other room sprawled out on the new couch, both of us mindlessly scrolling through our phones. âNot really, why?"Â
"Just, do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you didnât meet me, or if one of those random dates from your early twenties turned into something else?â The question wasnât really about another woman, but lately Iâve been thinking about the set of small decisions and diverging paths that led us to here. To six and a half years, a home, a daughter, some cats, new couches. Stuff. Chores. Unspoken rules and preferences for how things are supposed to be. Friends that arenât your friends or my friends, but our friends. Shared Google calendars. A life thatâs completely intertwined with each other, a history built on shared blocks. But what ifâ?Â
What if Iâd stayed in London for grad school after all? What if we never went to the same party at that bar? What if weâd both continued dating the people we were casually seeing then? What if I had instead somehow become the kind of cool single person who went out dancing at nightclubs? Or someone who joined Tinder, or smoked weed, or was a Christian? Who would we both be, were we not our current selves?Â
Sometimes the what-ifs take me far far away. What if we never got to meet at all because I got stuck in Europe with my dumb college band, trapped in a shitty other life with the person who almost ruined me?Â
What if he had moved into that basement apartment he once looked at before we met, the one pointed out every time we drive up to Northern Liberties for haircuts? What if we never learned how to grow into a first apartment, a series of apartments? If I hadnât been so consumed by the ladder of adulthood and debt, could we have untethered ourselves entirely and become one of those couples who backpacks around the world for a year?Â
What if I had kept writing my food blog? What if I got famous that way? If I hadnât already been imagining a future with children, with him, would I have stayed in journalism after all? And then what if I never took this job? What if I kept working at the gym, became the kind of person who worked out five days a week and did not, as it stands, have a soft belly like rising bread dough.Â
What if we stayed broken up, those couple of times? What if weâd moved to another city together? What if we didnât adopt all these cats? What if we were dog people? What if heâd never been assaulted that night in the dark, would we have stayed in the city? Would we live in a loft, be DINKs, go on Instagram-worthy vacations to Iceland?Â
What if I didnât get to stay pregnant? Surely the darkest timeline would be one in which our lives stayed separate, because Cora would not exist.Â
All of these what ifs might sound like regret, but theyâre not. Just questions. You donât get a do-over for your decisions, even ones inconsequential enough to barely register. I wouldnât want to change this anyway. But still, how many different people could we have been, I wonder?
