THE FIG TREE: A THOUSAND LIVES

"I saw my life branching out before me like a green fig tree in the story" - Sylvia plath(full quote after the piece) There was a time I believed I could become anything. Not in the soft, metaphorical sense people usually mean. I mean anything. Every door in the world stood open. Writer. Traveler. Scientist. Everything. I could fall in love and build a house with a garden behind it. I could vanish into another country and start over as someone else. I could become famous, or I could stay completely unknown. Somewhere in the future, a hundred versions of me were waiting, each standing at the end of a different road, each holding a life I hadn't stepped into yet. For a long time, I thought the hard part would be choosing between them. I was wrong. The hard part is what choosing costs. Pick one road and the others don't wait for you. They close. You choose a university, and somewhere another you walks onto a different campus. You choose a person, and another you falls for someone else entirely. You stay, and another you packs a bag. You leave, and another you never does. Choose one life and a hundred others quietly become things you could have been but aren't. A life narrows slowly, is the strange part. Not in one dramatic cut. A door shuts here. A path disappears there. A year goes by almost without your noticing. And then one day you look up and the forest you used to stand inside, wide and endless, has become a single trail under your feet. I still wonder about the others sometimes. The version who chose differently, who maybe teaches now, or lives by the sea, or wrote the book people actually read, or never met a single person I know. Happier, maybe. Maybe not. But there's this cruelty in imagining another life: you only get the good parts. You never see him at two in the morning, wrecked. You don't see his bills, his heartbreak, the mistakes he can't undo, the nights he's alone with nobody to call. You just see the fig on his branch, purple and glowing in some imagined afternoon light, and suddenly the one in your own hand looks a little less sweet by comparison. Maybe this is easy to write from here, before anything is really lost. Maybe the version of me a decade from now will read this and think: you had no idea. Or maybe not. Maybe the branching never really stops, and what looks like narrowing is just what the present always feels like from inside it. Maybe we were never meant to have every fig on the tree. Maybe we get one, and if we're fortunate, we find out it can hold more than we thought. Because you can still become several things inside the one life you picked. Write without becoming a writer. Travel without becoming a traveler. . Love someone without marrying them. Begin again, more than once, if you need to. Take a branch from a dream you didn't chase and graft it onto the life you're already living. You won't live every possible version of yourself. But you can live this one more than one way, and that might be enough. There will always be another you somewhere, Some nights you'll wonder what became of her. You don't have to kill off every life you didn't choose. Some can stay ghosts. Some can stay beautiful precisely because they're unfinished. Just don't stare so long at the other branches that you forget the fig in your hand. Because somewhere, in a life you'll never live, you're the one someone else wishes they'd picked. And the fruit doesn't wait. Eat it. <img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000113598.jpg"/>

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