I want to tell you a story my grandmother told me.
She called it the train story.
It stayed with me for years.
“Margaret,” she said, “life is a journey.”
“Sometimes we board the wrong train.”
I asked her what she meant.
“You take a path,” she said, “and it feels wrong.”
“What do you do then?”
“You get off at the nearest station.”
She said it so simply.
But it took her years to learn it.
She told me about her own youth.
She had married young, too young.
She stayed in a marriage that hurt her.
“Why did you stay so long?” I asked.
“I thought I had to finish the journey,” she said.
“Even on the wrong train?”
“Yes. That was my mistake.”
She said leaving felt like failure.
But staying was the real failure.
“The train keeps moving,” she told me.
“If you don’t get off, it takes you further away.”
Further from what, I wondered.
“From yourself,” she said.
She left eventually.
At forty-five, she started again.
People judged her for it.
“Isn’t it too late?” they asked her.
“Too late for what?” she replied.
“To be happy?”
She did not care anymore.
She rented a small flat.
She kept it clean, simple, hers.
Then she said something I never forgot.
“Our house isn’t cleaned until we hand over the keys ourselves.”
I didn’t understand at first.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We carry old rooms inside us,” she said.
“Old homes, old pain, old people.”
“They stay until we let them go.”
“You have to hand over the keys,” she said.
“Not someone else. You.”
Nobody could do that for her.
She had to choose it herself.
She asked me a question then.
“Which train are you on, Margaret?”
I didn’t answer right away.
“Think about it,” she said. “Think today.”
She passed a few years later.
I still hear her voice sometimes.
Asking me the same question.
Which train am I on now?
I think about it still.
Know your train. Get off if it’s wrong.