Maybe about everything.
But hindsight is 20/20.
Realizing I haven’t spoken in a few minutes, I look over at Ronnie and say, “When did you start turning into Mom with all of your wise words?”
She lets out a literal shiver. “Man, don’t put that curse on me.”
The woman doing my pedicure hits a part on the bottom of my foot that makes my ass bounce off the seat.
“Whoa! What are you doing?”
She holds up a large file. “Getting rid of the dead skin. It’ll make your feet soft.”
“Please stop,” I say.
“But it’s part of the pedicure.” She looks beyond confused.
“I understand. But if you keep doing that, I’m going to accidentally kick you in the face. For your own safety, it’s best that you stop.”
She looks to Ronnie who says, “As someone who has been kicked in the face by her, I suggest just moving on to painting her toenails.”
I don’t know that I want my toenails painted either, but it’s preferable to the alternative of the shit that tickles.
After I get another odd look for picking the color black, Ronnie and I are able to get back to our conversation.
She turns to me. “Jo, are you okay?”
“Not really. You brought me to a nail salon,” I joke.
That earns me an eyeroll. “I’m serious. Ever since you’ve been back, you haven’t seemed like yourself. Hell, you haven’t danced on a single bar top or tried to set anything on fire.”
“I’m okay,” I tell her. “I’ve been gone so long, and I think I’m just trying to figure out where I fit in.”
I’m a little envious of Ronnie because she never had these problems. She left town to travel the world, but she always kept one foot here in Lilly Leaf Falls. It was always her home base, and when she’d come back, she didn’t change a thing about herself. She knew exactly who she was. I used to feel like that. Now, I feel a bit like I’m flailing in the tide.
As if able to read my mind, Ronnie says, “Jo, you are a force of nature. You’ve never given a shit about fitting in. In fact, you always enjoyed going against the grain. What’s changed?”
“What hasn’t changed, Ronnie?”
“Jo, don’t you dare answer my question with a vague question of your own. Just answer me.”
Man, she really is sounding like our mother.
“Ten years ago, I was living here. I was one-hundred percent myself all the time. Then, I left. I jumped from guy to guy. Each one of them tried to change something about me. It was usually something small that I barely noticed before it was too late. It took little pieces of me until I started to forget what made meme. Now that I am home I don’t know how to be. If I go back to being wild and crazy Jo, everyone will tell me to calm down because I’m almost thirty. If I tone it down, my family will think something is psychologically wrong with me.”
Ronnie mulls over my words for a moment.
“You’ve never talked much about your life when you weren’t living here. We’ve gotten little tidbits, but you never gave any details.”
“Frankly, I don’t like to think about it much.”
“Why?” Ronnie asks.
“Well, for starters, I don’t come out looking very good in any of those stories. And I just don’t like spending that much time or energy thinking about the past. It’s too depressing.”
The things I’m telling her aren’t things I ever say out loud. I’d rather not think or talk about them and just pretend they never happened. Maybe that’s immature of me, but it’s the only way I know how to deal with things without falling down a deep dark hole of depression and self-loathing.
Reading my energy, Ronnie pivots the conversation a bit. “Jo, I have known you your whole life, and ever since you were born, you have lived life according to no one else’s rules. Just because some guy dulled your shine for a while doesn’t mean shit. You are one bad ass bitch, and you need to remind yourself of that every single day.”
