Life is just one version.

This is what I want on my tombstone. Writers know this, which is why they spend their lives creating different versions of the lives we all live. Why do we read novels? To experience lives that we haven't lived -- and that no one has lived. We want to know how it might have turned out if this or that character had chosen a different path. But aren't we all like that? Wouldn't your own life had turned out differently if you hadn't danced with that guy or you hadn't kissed that girl or hadn't taken home that wrong -- or right -- person? We are the sum of our choices.
We could have made different choices, and everything would have been different. As it is in fiction, so it is in in reality. Life is just one version. Everything could have been, might have been, oh so different.