Grieving the Unattained

All the lives I've never lived

Last week, I went to dinner with a group of women I don’t know very well. We met at a sticky-tabled thai restaurant with laminated menus and talked about reading and churches and the embarrassing things we wrote about as teenagers.

I asked one of them how she’d met her husband, and she told the story of him swooping in at a party in college just when she was hitting it off with someone else.

It sounded sweet - romantic in the what-almost-wasn’t kind of way. And she finished the story with what sounded like an afterthought:  

“I could be married to that other guy right now. And it would probably be fine.”

She said this and the conversation moved on and when dinner was over, I got back in my car, where sand and candy wrappers and other artifacts from the two-week road trip I’d just been on with my husband and our dog lay around my feet.

I thought about her comment all the way home.

She’s probably right. It probably would’ve been fine. People can marry lots of different people and most of the time it’s probably fine. (Unless you’re me and you marry the first person I married in which case it was not at all fine, but that’s not the point).

Our road trip was incredible. We went to six different cities in two weeks, spent just over 40 hours in the car, Ryan driving and me working from my hotspot at his side. We saw friends and explored new places and drove the Blue Ridge Parkway in the rain and hiked with our dog to a place just above the cloud line.

And we loved every moment of it. Some days the drives were long and we ran out of podcasts we were both interested in and we hit some weather on the way back that re-routed us a few hours north.

But we were happy. We laughed and took a million pictures and stopped at random roadside dog parks and decided over a few glasses of wine at the end of our trip that we think we want to move to Asheville.

(So now we’re praying about that, and asking God for discernment, and Zillow-ing at night before bed, and we’ll see where those things lead.)

If you’d told me I’d be actively praying about a move to North Carolina a year or two ago, I wouldn’t believe you. Last year, I was ready to move back to NYC. I hadn’t really yet accepted that I’d left it in the first place. Some days, I still haven’t.

My company is based there, my life feels irrevocably shaped by my time there, and my heart still longs for those streets and sounds and subways in a way that feels a bit like unrequited love for a place that didn’t even notice I left.

Every time I go back for work or to visit, I feel the pull to stay. I beg Ryan to move back with me. (And he, in his grace and kindness and long-suffering patience, waits it out until I recant when I remember taxes and our dog and my desire to start a garden.)

But it’s strange how true it all feels. In this moment, in a coffee shop in downtown Dallas, I feel equally as capable of moving back to NYC with my husband and my dog and too many books in tow as I do moving to Asheville and quitting my job to write and learning to compost.

And either, or neither, would probably be fine.

Travel does this to me. As much as it appeases the part of my soul that tends to feel a bit stuck when I stay in one place too long, it also feeds and fuels the part of me that sees a million other ways this life could go and feels equally exhilarated and horrified by the number of options.

There are so many places we could move, so many hobbies we could take on or jobs we could do or people we could meet if we just made the decision to do it. And when I travel, I see even clearer the vastness of those choices. I put myself in those places, those cities, those cultures and it feels tangible and energizing. It feels possible. It all feels so possible.

Travel is the yeast to the doughy underbelly of my tender, wandering heart. And I love and crave and fear it in equal measure.

Reading is a little like that, too. All those pesky books I love filled with endless stories that aren’t mine but feel like maybe they could be. Novels fill my soul and then leave me feeling a little empty because I’ll never be a scientist studying the migration of birds or a bookseller in Paris or a child living in a hotel in Russia and making friends with a scholar on house arrest.

A love for reading is the thing I most want to pass down to my children second only to salvation. I want so desperately for them to love books and stories and words the way I do for the escape and the hope and the perspective they give. I want their lives to be stretched and opened and changed by the likes of Ayn Rand or Sylvia Plath or Jane Austen or anyone else brave enough to tell an honest story through poetry or prose.

But maybe that’s setting them up for a life of little disappointments. To love stories is to realize all the ones that will never be yours. To love travel is to taste all the places you’ll never get to live.

It’s the kind of love that is insatiable, expansive. But love always begets grief, no matter how you slice it.

There are so many things I’ll never do, so many lives I’ll never live, subjects I’ll never study, places I’ll never go and versions of myself I’ll never become. And yet, I look around and see that Ryan has cleaned the kitchen while I was writing this. And the plants we propagated seem to be doing well and Hudson is happily squeaking his plush toy shaped like a croissant and the shoes I ordered last week were just delivered by a Fedex driver in a wide brimmed hat.

The bakery down the street just renovated and I’ll wear the new shoes when we walk over to see it and buy a non-toy croissant to share. And then, fueled by sugar and carbs, we’ll head to the nursery down the street and buy fresh herbs to plant in our window boxes. And tonight, I’ll make a perfectly fine meal with those same fresh herbs on top and we’ll watch the next episode in whatever series we’re watching right now and we’ll look at houses in Asheville on Zillow for a while before turning off the lights and falling asleep, together.

It's almost too obvious to say, but if I lived any of those other lives, those other stories, those other versions, I wouldn’t get to live this one. And they would’ve probably been fine. Mystifying and lonely and magical in their own ways. Full of different wonders, other loves, common grace.

And as haunted as I sometimes feel by the lives I will never get to live, I am utterly panicked by the thought of having made any single decision along the way that might’ve led to me never buying herbs on a sleepy Saturday with him.

It's all true at the same time. What never was and what is instead. What could’ve been avoided and what might’ve been lost. The people we never became and the ones we are instead – with agency to change, the ability to hope, the privilege of options, the capacity to love to the point of grief. And the gift of perspective – that any of it probably would’ve been fine, but how lucky am I that I don’t have to find out.

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What is the might-have-been you've been holding onto? What is it you need to let go of to better love or steward the life you have today?