text: Growing up I can remember my dad regularly telling my sister and me about how when he was pursuing his Masters in architecture, one of his professors liked him so much that he tried to recruit him to come work for a new firm that he was starting in London. As my parents would tell it, they had actually seriously considered the offer. My mom had decided that she could finish her schooling abroad while my dad got established in his career, and they would start their life together in the UK instead of in the States. The story goes, however, that when they were almost completely certain that they were ready to go ahead and embark on this adventure together, my mom found out she was pregnant with me, my dad’s dad got sick, and my dad’s old friend from high school asked my dad to move back to their hometown of Roca Roja, California and open a business together. And so their briefly considered dream of moving to England and carving out a life for themselves there had ended shortly after its inception and they stayed in the US and had me and my sister and lived happily ever after. Well, not really, as neither of them ended up living past the age of sixty, and they had to grieve my sister’s death when she was still a child. Still, there *was* happiness there. A lot of it, if you happened to be looking at the right times. I guess that applies to most people’s lives, really. If you only see people when they’re happy, then you assume they’re always happy. So we weren’t much different from any other family in California, or America, or the world. But the point I’m getting at, I guess, is that my parents would always tell my sister and I that if things had gone just slightly differently, we would have grown up in England. We would have had Londoner accents. We would have called chips ‘crisps’ and elevators ‘lifts.’ And growing up, I always indulged this fantasy wherein my life could have played out that way. I imagined a whole other history for myself where somehow I’d still be me, but everything in my life would be different. But it’s occurred to me recently that it just doesn’t really work that way. I could never have been British. I never could have lived anywhere but where I lived, and I never could have done anything other than what I did. If my parents *had* moved to England prior to my birth, they would have had a daughter, to be sure, they may even have named her ‘Karen,’ but she wouldn’t and couldn’t have been *me*. See, I have come to the epiphany because of events both recent and recently reconsidered that no one on the planet could be anything other than exactly what they are. We are, all of us, the sum total of our experiences, and any change to those experiences, however minute, results in a different person. So my parents could have had a daughter my age named Karen, with my birthday, my hair color, my exact genetic makeup, my propensity for procrastination and my god awful sense of fashion, my love of Mexican food and cheap margaritas, but no matter how much we had in common, she still wouldn’t have been me nor I her. And that’s to say nothing of my younger sister, who wasn’t even mentally or emotionally conceived, nevermind physically, at the time my parents had been considering the move. So there wouldn’t even have been a little British girl genetically identical to my sister in that alternate world. The number of possible genetic combinations from two people is just too insanely high for someone with her exact genes to have been created at any time or in any place besides the one she was created in. So maybe my parents would have conceived a second time, but it might have been a son, or twins, or a little girl who was nothing like my sister. And maybe that other child or those other children might even have survived into adulthood. God, what a fucked up thought. And by the time they came to the decision to move overseas, my parents too would have become different people than the parents I knew. The moment their paths diverged from the histories that I’m familiar with, they would have stopped being my parents and started being other people entirely. And the further removed from that point they got, the less and less like my parents they would become. All that is to say that my parents, my sister, *me*, we all were only the things we were because of the things that happened. Any other series of events would have necessarily made different people. Maybe better people, maybe happier people, but definitely different. I think it’s comforting, sometimes, to look back and imagine what else and who else we might have been if things had gone differently, or if we’d made different decisions. If we’d just done *that* thing at *that* time, maybe things would have worked out differently. Sometimes it’s fun to think about, and other times it’s a crutch to help us get through our daily existence in this reality to imagine that things are better in some other one. But it’s only ever a fantasy, and not just because you can’t change the past. It’s a fantasy because, even if you *could* change the past, you would no longer be *you*. And, after all, sometimes these fantasies go far beyond comforting, and instead become the subject of unhealthy obsession, unobtainable desire, impossibly frustrating ideation. I know this all too well because any time I would imagine my sister and me living in London, my daydreams inevitably led me to believe that in that version of my life, she might have survived her cancer, or might never have gotten it at all. Maybe the healthcare system in the UK would have caught her sickness earlier, treated it better, saved her life. Maybe she’d have been at my wedding. Maybe I’d have been at hers. But she wasn’t. And I wasn’t. And who would that other me have married, anyway? Probably some British guy. Maybe an American if for whatever reason her parents moved back to the States at some point, or if she had come here for school or something. But whoever it was, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been Jason. And maybe that other Karen and her husband would have found themselves preparing to bring a child into their world at this stage in life, just as Jason and I are now, but it would have been a different child, not the son I’m carrying inside my body right now; not the little boy whose bright eyes and beautiful face I can’t wait to see. And this, more than anything, is what’s allowed me to reevaluate how I feel about imagining alternate lives and divergent realities, because I have realized little by little that I don’t want some other version of my life. I don’t want to be that woman who grew up in Britain. I don’t even want to be that woman whose sister lived to see her teens or twenties or beyond. I only want to be who I am. I only want to have experienced the things I’ve experienced, to know and love the people I know and love, and to wake up in a few months in the middle of the night to a screaming newborn baby who already owns my heart even before he’s arrived on this earth. Now, instead of dreaming of and longing for some other life someone much like me might have had, I find myself waking up in a cold sweat, struggling to shake the fear that all the things I have that I hold dear in this life might have been somehow imagined, that they might be just as gaseous and ethereal as all the lives I never lived, until I turn over in bed and there’s Jason, as solid and real as the life growing in my womb, as real as the air I’m breathing and the ground beneath my feet. As real as the fact that my parents and my sister are all long gone. As real as the fact that I have never set foot in England. And sure, there are still many things I want in this life that I don’t have. There are still experiences that I hope to have. The difference is that now I only want those things to be in the future. My past, for all its faults, is the only past I want, because without it I don’t get to be me, and I don’t get to look forward to the bright future I dream that I’ll have. "What are you thinking about, babe?" I look for a while at Jason before answering. He looks tired. He always looks tired these days and I keep telling him that he needs to work less, relax more. But today he looks especially tired, pale, sickly even. But he's still Jason, and he's still smiling warmly at me. "I'm thinking about you." "About me?" "And us. And our baby. About my sister ... about England." "About England? Like how you could've grown up there, right?" "Exactly. Except I couldn't have. And I'm glad I didn't.