Other lives not selected

(Deren's Show and Tell chick Photo courtesy Gillian Sohna 2010)

I am in love. He is beside the tarp we've covered in books, panting from the heat inside his deep mass of white fur. I can barely accept the realness of this dog, his wistful black eyes, feather-duster tail and fuzzed-over ears - but since I'm not a pet-crazed seven year old, I didn't know about Samoyed dogs until today. I am politely extracting intelligence from his owners while I plot how I'm going to steal this lovable polar bear and make him the cuddly solution to surviving winter, loneliness and in fact any other tragedy that life devises. He'll have to outlive me of course, but science has come a long way since I've been gone.
I was recently told, as a sort of compliment, that I am "way too selfish to have even half a child," a reflection, no doubt on lifestyle choices that have hindered any advancement towards fulfilling my biological destiny (which I'm assured by many I will fulfill.) While I might have, at one point, rejected a certain paradigm (the one where I marryandbuyahouseandhavesomebabiesandstuff) that is only the accidental result of chances, some of them quite tiny at their time if not their timing in history.

But longing for a huge fuzzilicious friend conjures other possible outcomes, and the thinking of where the slightest nurturing of other possibilities might have led. I cannot have a Samoyed, at least at no point soon, achingly adorable though he was. Is this regret, dissatisfaction? More, it's the pondering, how many degrees separate me from my alter outcomes, wherein I decide to buy that house in Ecuador, marry that guy with the crispy hair, focus on making money, build upon the material rather than the ethereal. But what I'm wondering is if other outcomes die. Were they ever? Would I feel this kind of longing, this love, for things that aren't, if they in fact, were? Or would I rest my head on Koda's snowy side with the bored assumption that something else could have been more meaningful and complete? Would the rise and fall of his sighs underneath my ear be the comfort of a warmer, more familiar life chosen, or a sad disappointment of possibilities never considered?