Had One Thing Gone Differently
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
Sometimes I lie awake and marvel
at the mathematics of existence—
how a billion unremarkable moments,
each insignificant on its own,
aligned with impossible precision
to place me here,
in this life,
in this breath,
in the soft gravity of you.
Life is such a fragile architecture.
A single deviation—
a missed bus,
a different heartbreak,
a moment of hesitation
on a random Thursday—
and the entire future
would have reconfigured itself
without ever consulting me.
I would have stepped
into a different story
with a different ending
and never known
what I’d lost.
It humbles me,
how easily a life can pivot.
How one thought,
one accident,
one quirk of timing,
can dismantle or deliver
everything.
We walk through our days
oblivious to how close we are
to alternate universes
where our lives
never touched.
And yet—
somehow,
despite the chaos,
despite the randomness
of atoms and choices
and human fallibility,
we collided.
Not gently,
not inevitably,
but with the force
of something that feels
both mathematical
and miraculous.
When I look at you,
I feel the weight
of every version of myself
that never made it here—
the ones derailed by fear,
the ones swallowed by grief,
the ones who would have missed
the exact sequence of moments
that led me to your door.
I grieve them a little.
But mostly,
I thank them
for surviving long enough
to give me this one.
What an extraordinary truth—
that in all the infinite timelines
in which we do not meet,
we somehow landed
in the one where we do.
Where your laugh
became my favourite sound,
your presence
my quiet compass,
your love
the soft, steady reason
I believe in meaning at all.
Had one thing gone differently,
the world would have built itself
without you in it—
or without me beside you.
And I would have wandered
through my life
never knowing
what I was missing.
Never knowing
what grace felt like
in human form.
But everything—
every fracture,
every near-miss,
every detour,
every inexplicable survival—
folded itself into a path
that led me here.
To you.
To us.
And I cannot help but think
that of all the miracles
this fragile world has to offer,
finding you
was the one
that rewrote the rest.
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