55. Yolanda

Yolanda sat in a gray plastic patio chair in her garage, swirling the ice in her tea.  The air was thicker than normal for a late April day. She looked at me seated next to her and made note of it, then continued to look outside at the sun setting over the elderly housing community where she lived with her daughter, my mother. I was twenty two at the time.

Truth be told, I never really liked the woman. She came a few times a year to visit when I was really small and she was always really cold to my brother and I. She was my first glimpse at a person who probably really hated her life, all eighty something years of it. I don't recall her speaking positively about anything except when she was positive that one of her children was acting ridiculous.

All that in mind, she gave me one of the most important pieces of unsolicited advice that I will likely ever receive.

She looked back at me.

"So you love that boy you're with? Jerry's his name right?"

"Yeah, his name is Jerry and I love him very much Gramma."

"You going to marry him?"

"I'm not sure. We've only been together two years. I'd imagine so. I think that's where it's going."

"So that's it, huh?"

"Yeah, that would be it. We'd get a place on the coast and let life happen that way."

"But what do you want to do OUTSIDE of Jerry?" She asked. "Your mother said you like to write and draw. Do you do either of those things?"

"Not really. Too busy."

"Too busy being Mrs. Jerry whatever his last name is right?"

I wasn't a fan of the inquisition I was getting by a woman I barely talked to, never mind liked.

"Listen, Jessie. Let me tell you something. I loved your grandfather, and I love your mother and aunts and uncle very much. I was very blessed to be given the life I was given. Some people aren't so lucky. But with my generation, that's what you did. You got married, and you had kids and to some degree those kids were expected to get married and have kids too. You're generation though, you're not expected to do a damn thing you don't want to. Women have gone to the moon. Women have held office. Those things weren't possible when I was your age. Hell, when I was your age I had two babies and was pregnant with a third!"

She looked at me in the eyes.

"If that boy makes you happy and you want to devote your life to him, I say you do it! Jump right in and give it your everything. But if there's even a little voice inside your head telling you that maybe, MAYBE this isn't the road you want to be on, than you need to follow that voice until it lands you where you're supposed to be, you hear me? Trust that voice, because that's YOU talking OK?"

A few months later I started hearing it. At first it was a whisper from a room away. Gradually it became a person I was having a conversation with in my dreams. After a while, I would hear it so loudly and feel it so physically that it would wake me up, screaming at me from inside my chest.

It took five years from that day, but that voice and I are finally in sync. It exists in me, as me now, not a separate entity like it used to.