I set out to choose this year’s resolution very carefully.
Because last year I casually tossed out the idea, to live with less stuff. And then casual became a luxury. And resolution turned prophecy.
Don’t leave in the middle of the night, she said to me.
As though I could disappear myself and all of my things without making any noise. As though I might.
In the end it proved a clunking, inelegant Houdini-esque escape--all fumbled chains and unpicked locks and taxi rides uptown.
And a very, very much stuff left on a small stretch of curb between Bleecker and West Houston.
So in November, as the year’s end drew to a close, I set about choosing my resolution very carefully.
And choose I did.
To love. To love and all its many iterations. An action. A discovery. To love and all that that entails.
But I would stake my life on the fact that words choose us. Not the other way round.
And so in the end there was another set of words, not louder, but more persistent.
To stretch.
To stretch and all that that means.
Which is, quite a lot, as it turns out.
Which is literal and metaphorical. Which is me sitting at my desk, limbs all akimbo, trying to work the kinks out. Which is kindness offered more freely. Which is trying new things and working a bit harder. Which is letting go more easily and asserting my worth even when its terrifying. Which is sitting in the discomfort and breathing through it.
Which is me, up twenty minutes earlier than usual each morning, on top of a foam roller, hoping to loosen the inflexible mass that is my back. Which is really me, on top of a foam roller, opening up the area around my heart.
Which seems exactly the point.