All the women who had conceived my soul but lost my life in the past had believed the same. And there were many before her—the sweet Yoshi, the spitfire Darlene, and the tragedy, Tawana. But faith alone had not been strong enough to anchor me to their wombs. I never grieved when I died; I tried again, though I wasn’t itching to find myself dropped into the vicious worlds I saw waiting for me through their eyes. When the months crept on and I grew older inside Shivana than with any others in the past, I started to believe I could see my face on the outside of my dreams. It was up to me to convince Shivana to want to see my face on the outside of her own dreams.

I knew I was eventually meant to make it—one day. I just wanted it to be a day when my life would be right. Until that day, I found solace in imagination’s peace, the pondering of the “what ifs”: What if the women had been White? What if the women had been privileged? What if the men had been taught how to love them? To those questions, I drew my own conclusions. I wish I could have shared them with all my mothers, if they could have heard me. And if I had found out, in time, how our shared story would finally end.

BACK TALK.

That’s how it sounds when a little voice inside of you splits your thoughts in half. Splashes the half-empty glass against the mirror you think through so you can consider it was fuller than you had thought. Makes you look past the tiny beads of your perspective to finally see yourself, and everyone else, as a shredded design in a kaleidoscope: complicated, unpredictable, subject to change but no less beautiful because of it. Sometimes, more beautiful because of it.

I heard something speaking to me, could tell something was trying to talk to me, and still tried to ignore everything I heard. I don’t care who she is, how much money she has, where she comes from, how good she believes her man is, or what the circumstances of her own coming into this world were. Every woman is going to have some questions when she finds out she has another life inside. And she will have doubts. And fears. Deciding on the life of somebody else isn’t the best place to be when you’re deciding on your own.