In another world, we don't hide in the cupboard. We don't make it through the portal, and Ed doesn't betray us, and Peter never gets his sword. In another world, Lucy stays a child for many more years, and I keep waiting for the day I will finally be grown up and able to do something.
In another world, Narnia never exists for us, and the White Witch stays out of the years of Edmund's dreams. Peter waits years before learning what it is to kill, and Lucy doesn't ever have to train how to recognize the signs and accurately determine how close death is to a wounded soldier.
In another world I never have to face the fact that my brother's eyes are old, old like my father's; I never have to see a dead soldier with my arrow sticking in his heart; and I never have sit up late at night and wonder if the decision I just made will cost anyone their life. People rarely realize that a crown is the weight of lives in your hands, and not just the power of it. In another world, I never realize that either.
In another world, we never become more than English schoolchildren, ordinary children caught up in the great war that tore so many families apart. We are never crowned, and we never rule, and we don't ever make decisions that decide the fate of thousands.
And if one ordinary day long, long ago, we had made different decisions, or a thousand little things had turned out differently - then that other world would be all we would know. And maybe I wouldn't be able to see the grace that is always available to use in difficult situations; and maybe Ed would still be lost, looking for acceptance and forgiveness in all the wrong places; maybe Lucy would cry herself to sleep every night for years; and maybe Peter would walk on the streets like a boy instead of the king he is inside; and maybe we would have never met Aslan or learned what it is to love. And maybe that would be an awful price to pay; but sometimes, it doesn't matter and I wish it was true anyway.
One of the limitations of humanity is that we only get to know one reality at a time. We will never know how things might have turned out in that other world; or be able to tell if it would have been better. But I do know one thing - to have never gone would have been to have never known Aslan; and to have never known Aslan would have been to never love - for Aslan is love.
And what does it say to you that we have now been sent back to a world without Aslan?
Here, alone, I'm pretending that other world is real. And sometimes, the others hate me for it - but their hating hurts less than it should and so I am staying here in America, caught up in lipstick, and nylons, and invitations - and for now at least, this other world is all I choose to acknowledge.
Is this how it ends?
[well who can ever say if love is worth it?
to have loved and lost hurts worse
than just straight dying]
Hannah Mathews, Love