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a new year's blessing

This is a love letter to you dreaming at the wheel of your car in traffic. To you with your bags packed but no ticket or map. To you listening to that band play that song you sang the last time an audience thronged at your feet. To you at the desk watching the mortar sift between the bricks, to you decanting a drink to ease through the evening, to you hunched double on the floor staring at the sock he left behind, covered with dust from under the dresser from where you pulled it in the maw of your cleaning frenzy, sure now that this pain will unmake you. For you perfectly masked at the gym and the grocery, the club and the office, everyone’s friend, everyone’s crutch, everyone’s first call for a good time or to extinguish a crisis, never known or seen to fissure or bleed though you fissure, though you bleed. For you, this love letter from the raw and shambolic interior, from the rotten spots that surrender to make way for unmitigated joy. For you under the thumb of a name that chafes, in a kitchen full of gas clutching a damp match, waking in the morning to an aging stranger in the mirror, a love letter to your hunger. To the trillion ringing cells in your left leg alone. To your almost, to your never, to your yet. A love letter to you twelve years in and starting over, lopping the dead branch to save the tree, stopping by the house where your child body flowered and you ran laps around the yard though nothing was chasing you then, knowing someone else lives there now, amid the stones you laid behind the radiator grates. A love letter to the part of you that runs, that believes even in what you cannot see, that dogged yes that pulls or shoves you out of your comfy chair and into the street or light of what’s next. A love letter to your next.

(excerpt from Beasts of Our Own Making: One Perfectionist’s Practices for Surviving Ourselves)