Blog 1: Sept. 12, 1996—I hear the clock ticking, the cicadas buzzing to a different time outside my family home in New Jersey. The steam evaporates along the rim of the cup I am holding. It is nighttime. It is quiet for three seconds, it seems. I feel emptiness.
I hold the resonance of Patricia’s words in my gut. I shared dinner wit
h her, her husband
(both from South America), and my parents tonight. Patricia held my hand, looked me in the eyes, and asked me with Latin warmth and knowing why I was going west. Why not Spain? She asked. She knew I had loved Spain as a child, had always wanted to return there because it had felt like the only home I had known. I told her I had promised myself I’d go back when I had something to give, and not until then. You don’t have to limit yourself, she reminded me.
Tonight, at the kitchen table, I know she is right. I cry. I’m going west because a part of me wants to start fresh, have a new beginning, where judgment and rules don’t follow me. But I feel the illusion of this idea that, light and free, I can follow my spirit’s longing—the one I carried as a child in the fields of Spain—out west. And Patricia seems the only one who’s not applauding me for my ability to pick up and go and create life a thousand times over as I’ve done so many times in my stubborn way.
As I sit at my parent’s kitchen table, I cry. I ask, for this moment, that I be the kind of frail that’s strong but asks for true insights that don’t come from answers but from hearing my heart and listening to its needs. I listen. But my journey is tomorrow. I am going west, and not east, not across the Atlantic Ocean toward Spain, to my heart’s home.
HAVE YOU EVER MADE A DECISION RELUCTANTLY THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF YOUR LIFE?
Michelle Adam 