"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. “Not really, why?"
"Just, do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you didn’t meet me, or if one of those random dates from your early twenties turned into something else?” The question wasn’t really about another woman, but lately I’ve 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 aren’t your friends or my friends, but our friends. Shared Google calendars. A life that’s completely intertwined with each other, a history built on shared blocks. But what if—?
What if I’d stayed in London for grad school after all? What if we never went to the same party at that bar? What if we’d 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?
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?
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 hadn’t 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?
What if I had kept writing my food blog? What if I got famous that way? If I hadn’t 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.
What if we stayed broken up, those couple of times? What if we’d moved to another city together? What if we didn’t adopt all these cats? What if we were dog people? What if he’d 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?
What if I didn’t get to stay pregnant? Surely the darkest timeline would be one in which our lives stayed separate, because Cora would not exist.
All of these what ifs might sound like regret, but they’re not. Just questions. You don’t get a do-over for your decisions, even ones inconsequential enough to barely register. I wouldn’t want to change this anyway. But still, how many different people could we have been, I wonder?