Here’s What To Do With All The “What If’s” In Your Life

Your what if’s hold a phantom pen, writing the unwritten stories you swear would have been. They would’ve played out like magic, becoming a tale too beautiful, too unworldly, to exist in the reality outside of your head. It’s the what if’s that drive you insane but keep you calm. They soothe the realities of your mistaken fate – because, surely, God had a mishap and gave you the wrong story. So you invent the right one instead.

You invent it so real and so beautiful that you forget that it doesn’t exist. You even forget that it might have never existed. Despite the carefully crafted alternative reality you invent, the one in which the smallest things changed, things that despite their minuscule size, could have, and, you swear, would have, changed everything. The challenge comes with living with the mishap, the path you don’t think you should have been thrown down, the universe in which you didn’t get your what if.

It feels like molding together misplaced puzzle pieces, cutting them into size, supergluing until they all fit together. It is a struggle that sometimes feels unfair, like your pieces should not need superglue and force and change and so much sacrifice that it makes you wonder if you accidentally cut off a piece you needed so crucially, just to make it all fit together.

But it is a struggle so real that it has to come out beautifully at the end. It has to be an imperfect, loud testament to the efforts that went into its making. And it will. What is will prove to be so much more worthy than the what if that never got to be, and you will get to a point where you feel uneasy thinking about the possibility of the indescribably wondrous road you wound up going down, having ended up in the rubble of the what if’s.