In my teenage years I, like many others at that age (I imagine), spent a not-insignificant portion of my time thinking about fate. There were comparatively few momentous events in my life; I didn’t have to pull the rope for very long to find what seemed like the beginning, or a beginning. One of my college application essays was about the ability of a traffic light to change one’s destiny. I am not ashamed to admit that Sliding Doors was and still might be one of my favorite movies.
Now, at thirty, I’ve lived enough – and have learned enough family history – that the rope goes back to before I was even born, is sufficiently long so as to feel infinite. When I try to pull on it my brain shuts down. There have been a lot of traffic lights along the way, too many to count.
Nine days ago, I picked up the rest of my stuff from my old apartment. I didn’t have much left there. With the exception of some books that I will go back for later, it all fit into the trunk and half the rear seat of my new used car. One thing I carried out with me, and will continue to carry, is a memory of what my roommate said to me on a hungover morning last fall. She’d just started dating after getting out of a serious relationship, and was regretting an angry text she’d sent the night before to a guy who was taking his time to ask her out. When I asked her how she was finding single life, she said, “The more people I meet, the less certain I am about love.”
The more I’ve lived, the less certain I am that I was meant for any one life. I can see myself in many trajectories, and no one is necessarily better than another, just … different. When I was younger I felt more enchanted by the notion of fate because, I think, I was less aware of the possibilities of what a life could look like. Even the big decisions I made were non-decisions: Of course I was going to move to New York! Of course I was going to work in advertising! Of course I would leave and start a company! It felt like I had no other choice, not that this is a bad thing. But there definitely appeared to be an ideal path to follow, that this – whatever “this” was at the time – was what I was meant to do. Maybe when we collect so much evidence for something, eventually we end up refuting we’re trying to prove.
