Lives I’d Never Lead

There are moments in life when a single choice feels like a doorway. I used to imagine myself standing in a long corridor, lined with doors, each one opening into a different version of me. Some I stepped through. Others, I only glanced at before walking past. And some… I never even touched.

I often wonder about the lives I’d never lead.

When I was seventeen, I almost left my small hometown to study music in another city. I had been accepted into a conservatory, my guitar slung over my back like a passport to freedom. But my father fell ill that same summer. I stayed, working in the local bookstore instead, stacking shelves and listening to customers hum the very songs I longed to play. In another life, perhaps, I am a musician, touring the world, living in borrowed apartments with walls covered in posters of my own concerts. In this life, I learn to find rhythm in the turning of pages and the creak of ladders as I shelve another book.

Then there was Maria. She was all laughter and fire, the kind of girl who spoke about tomorrow as though it were already written in the sky. She asked me once, standing beneath the lamplight outside her parents’ house, if I loved her. The word yes rose to my lips, but I swallowed it down. I told myself I wasn’t ready. Weeks later, she left for college in another country. She sent me a postcard once, a photograph of Paris, with nothing written but, Wish you’d been here. In another life, I am her husband, father of our children, tracing the lines of her face as the years soften it. In this life, I still keep that postcard pressed inside the pages of a poetry book I rarely open.

Work, too, offered me doors I did not take. At twenty-five, I was offered a job in the city, one that promised money, reputation, the glittering illusion of success. I turned it down, afraid to lose the quiet simplicity of my town. Perhaps in another life I wear tailored suits, carry a briefcase, and stare at the skyline from an office window fifty floors high. In this life, I walk the same streets every morning, nodding to the same neighbors, finding peace in the familiar.

Sometimes, late at night, I imagine meeting all those other versions of myself. The musician, the lover, the businessman. We sit across from each other in silence, each of us wondering who chose better, who lived braver. Perhaps the musician envies the steadiness of my days. Perhaps the businessman envies the freedom of my evenings. Perhaps even the man who married Maria wonders what it would have been like if he had stayed behind in the quiet town, listening to the soft chime of the bookstore door as another customer walks in.

But here is the truth I have learned: every life we do not lead is not a loss, but a shadow. They remind us that we are infinite in possibility, yet finite in choice. To live one life fully means to close the door on countless others. And that is not a tragedy—it is the very definition of being human.

Yesterday, a boy came into the store. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, carrying a guitar case too big for his frame. He asked if I had any books about music theory. I found him one, and as I handed it over, I noticed his hands trembling—not from fear, but from the weight of dreams. For a moment, I saw myself in him, standing again at the threshold of a life I never lived. I wanted to tell him to go, to chase it, to not be afraid the way I had been. But I didn’t. I only smiled and said, “This book will take you far.”

As he left, I realized something: perhaps the lives we never lead don’t vanish. They wait quietly, finding their way into others. The music I never played, the love I never confessed, the city I never walked—all of it continues, somewhere, through someone else.

And so, I close the shop for the night, step into the cool air, and walk home under the same stars that have watched me all my life. No, I will never live those other lives. But I will live this one, as deeply and honestly as I can. And that, I think, is enough.