The Life That Could Have Been

Every immigrant carries two versions of their life:

The one they built.
And the one they left behind.

In another timeline, we never left.
We wake up to familiar streets, eat the food we grew up with, speak without ever translating in our heads.
We celebrate birthdays surrounded by family. We visit childhood friends without needing a plane ticket.

We don’t have to explain where we’re from.
We don’t have to miss people across oceans.
We don’t have to wonder what it would have been like if we had stayed.

And yet—we did leave.

We built new lives, made new friends, planted roots in unfamiliar soil.
We learned how to belong to a place that never fully belonged to us.

But every now and then, we catch glimpses of that other life—
A song in our first language.
A dish that tastes almost like home.
A photo of someone who still lives in the world we left behind.

And we wonder.

Would we have been happier?
Would life have been easier?
Would we still be us—or would we have become someone entirely different?

We’ll never know.

Because the thing about the life that could have been—

Is that it only ever exists in our minds.