There’s only one time in my life which I occasionally look back on and wonder ‘what if’?

Winnipeg, Canada, 1976.

I was 19 and had recently split up with my boyfriend of two years (we had been living together) and I suddenly decided that I had to move to New York. I’m not sure why, but this was a time when New York was quite magical, or was being portrayed as such in films, books, music, art…

And so, I moved in with a friend temporarily, put my few belongings into storage and was all packed and ready to go, planning to stop off to visit an old friend living near Toronto before going on to New York. I had no idea what I was going to do there. Didn’t know a soul, had next to no money, though as it turned out this was to become a pattern I ended up repeating more than once later on in my life.

Then, shortly before I was about to leave, I was out for a walk and passed a house where I knew my ex-boyfriend’s best friend was now living. I’d never met this friend as he’d been away at a private mental hospital in Topeka Kansas until recently, the same one James Taylor had gone to and had apparently met ‘Susanne’, for whom he later wrote Fire and Rain. But I digress.

It was late spring and I saw someone working in the front garden and he looked up – I can’t remember who spoke first – and that was it. Not only did I not move to New York but I immediately moved in with him, my ex-boyfriend’s mentally unstable best friend, and married him three months later. Now that turned out to be a disaster, but thankfully it didn’t last that long. A year or so later I had left him and moved on . . . but by then my dream of moving to New York had died.

But what if I had moved there? What would I have done, who would I have met, what totally other experiences would I have had? How totally different would my life be now? I do sometimes wonder. It’s not a feeling of regret, per se, more just a curiosity that I know will never be satisfied.

Years later, when I was 32 and had been living in Toronto for several years, I suddenly felt like I had to move to Spain. It was the same inexplicable desire that I had experienced about moving to New York – something inside me just knew I had to go there. Only this time I did it. Well, I was 33 when I left Canada and took a bit of a detour (a year and a half in Bristol, England) before getting here. And the first day I arrived in Spain, driving down from England with a friend, it felt like coming home – I knew that I was home – and that feeling has never left me.

Any other crossroad stories out there, when you zigged instead of zagging, so to speak?