What Might Have Been Me

Is it ever too late to become the person you might have been?

Suzanne expected me to come home but my life was here in New York. Almost eleven years with Eddie—eleven years of working, watching movies, making love, doing laundry, going to yoga. These things made up a life, didn't they? And if they didn't, then what did?

While Carla's friends went back to college in Ireland at the end of the summer, she decided to stay in New York. She'd fallen in love—with her musician boyfriend Eddie, and with the city. In New York she could write, go to the best school, and become the person she wanted to be—someone she couldn't be in her old life in Dublin, with her mother, her sister, and the memories of her father's death. But then, out of the blue, she receives a phone call from home with some devastating news. Now Carla has to choose between her New York life and her life back home in Dublin. As she grapples with some difficult decisions, she begins to understand that her reasons for staying in New York may not have been quite as simple as she thought, and that, while distance and time might let you become someone else, it takes love to come home to yourself. This is a story about love, loss, courage, and responsibility—to our family, to the people we love, but most of all to ourselves.