What She Wants

"Everywhere I looked as a kid and everywhere I look now I see people who have pursued a path that's traditional. Two car garage on a three bedroom house. A couple of kids and both parents working. Soccer practice and PTA meetings and all the rest of it. The busy rush rush of modern suburban life, the one that we're all raised to believe we should want. The one that I was raised to believe I should have.

"And I don't want it. There are a lot of things in this life, a whole lot of options, and I don't want a bunch of them. I don't want a white picket fence. I don't want a happy bit of joy when I get the right combination of lines on a pregnancy test. I don't want any of it. I don't see the point. I don't see the joy. I only see the burden.

"And that might make me sound jaded or whatever. Everyone I've ever told this to says that I'm naive, that I'll change my mind. And I don't know for sure what it is that I do want, but I figure starting with what I don't is at the very least a start."

It all makes sense to me. Her motivations and her reasoning are sound. And I get a flash for an instant of a long suffering and much annoyed youngest child who is constantly the last one tagging along and realize that, if I had her upbringing, I probably would have thought along those lines too.

"No husband?" I ask, tentatively.

"Hell Emily," she curses, peeved and frustrated at me before she finally smiles brightly and shakes her head, "I haven't thought that far. And if you're going to bring up something about that being promiscuous in my twenties is going to make it hard for a man to want to settle down with me then you can just hold your tongue now. Before you start sounding like my mother when she caught me with the pastor's kid behind the church on Easter Sunday."

"No," I shake my head, eager not to be misunderstood, "Nothing like that. Any guy who judges you for having fun isn't the kind of guy you want to be with."

"Damn straight. But if you're asking do I want to do this forever. Just jumping around and having fun? No, I don't. I want a life with meaning and I'm going to find it.

"But for now I'm young and I'm having fun. We're only going to be this young and this carefree, this unburdened, for so long. So while I have the chance to have as much fun as I can, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that."

Another few steps. Another meaningful pause.

And in that time I think of Baba Yaga and the message she had for me. The fact that I was here to help these people find their path, their purpose. I know I can't just let it lie.

So meekly, I go on, "I feel aimless."

"You're young."

"But still," I continue, "I can't help but feel like I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. Pursuing a degree that leads to I don't know where. Doing all of this. It just makes me wonder whether I'm making the right choices."

I sigh, remembering the sad little man in his sad little life. Going between a sad little cubicle and an empty little apartment. Entirely alone.

"I don't want to wind up working a job I hate, one that has no meaning. I don't want to wind up twenty years down the road wishing... hoping for a second chance."

Rachel, to her credit, doesn't jump all over me. Neither does she try to assuage my fears. And when I glance over I see she's thinking thoughtfully, considering it. And I also see somewhere deep behind her eyes that she has the same fear too.

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