a poem for January 1st
Goals unmet.
Failures achieved.
Regrets aplenty.
Sounds like another year has passed...
Were I the girl I once knew,
I might wallow for a spell and nurse the old wounds,
oblivious to, and even strangely comforted by,
their ritually parasitic companionship.
It's the Auld Lang Syne rite of dewy-eyed sentimentality.
A time for the maudlin among us to memorialize our past regrets,
and wistfully pine for a better tomorrow.
But that old girl has gone, along with all her mismatched baggage.
The man with the answer knew it all along...
He was calling me, but for a long time I somehow got him mixed up
with someone else. Or something else.
Like the perfect seashell that you know is there on the beach -
but you must be mindful of its utter uniqueness so that you can recognize it
amongst all the ordinary bits and pieces of itself that the sea is always belching up.
I finally understood that the voice was somehow formed to fit me.
Like a murmur knitting itself into a sweater and enveloping you completely.
So of course, I grabbed my luggage and off I went.
...only to realize that the heft of my bags made travel inordinately impractical.
Why did I have so much junk?
Leave it at the curb; just get in the car.
But I couldn't do it; I couldn't just leave it there.
What if someone else found it? What would they do with it?
Who would fix the broken stuff, wrestle with the questions, return all the borrowed thoughts?
It was hard to climb in with all my junk. But I pushed and squeezed and slid in.
For a while I wondered why it seemed so uncomfortable,
like driving to a safari loaded down with scuba diving gear.
It was awkward and bulky and it just didn't feel right.
But I held on tight and just tried to keep my arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.
Holding on to my stuff.
Much later when it was quiet I asked him about it.
I had to, since I started noticing the other people on the trip.
Most of them weren't dragging a bunch of stuff around.
I had begun to feel self-conscious about my bags,
checking to see that all the pieces were there;
making sure nobody touched them or looked at any of them too closely.
The other travelers looked more relaxed. They were certainly covering more ground.
Maybe it was because their arms weren't so tired
and they never had to worry about lost luggage or that sort of thing.
That's when I found out that I really wasn't supposed to bring all that old stuff with me.
None of it was necessary. Or even helpful.
Knowing I could now get rid of my luggage, I decided to chuck it all out the window.
Strangely though, I found that I was unable to accomplish this in one motion,
mostly due to the pain of prying certain things out of my hands.
I have always had an inordinate fondness for the familiar...
But I began to dump my junk, sometimes a little bit and sometimes by the bucketful.
It seems that the more I release, the easier moving forward becomes.
Like cutting off the parachute lines once you've landed on the ground.
I'm starting to feel like there's a brand new fissure in the cosmos made just for me to settle into.
It conforms to my real hills and my real valleys, with allowances
for my question marks and my exclamation points.
Unlike my old space, that never did fit right,
this one feels spanking new yet comfortably warm, and not too tight.
It's
a
right
place
for
a
journey
home.
