Resolutions

On the eve of the year’s most spectacular Eve, one can only ponder the possibility for resolutions.

First things first: I resolve to put 10% of my monthly income into my IRA or my Savings Account for an entire year.

I resolve to throw myself a fabulous birthday party in January:
a) Because I haven’t done that in years, and
b) Because it’s on Friday the 13th and a full moon.

But what’s really in me?
What’s digging around under my skin, deep into my heart, thick as blood?

I have learned that strangers know no shame. I have learned that friends can make great lovers. I have learned that with some people, there is just something, almost animalistic, unexplainable – it may be a smell, maybe the way he sweats or how he laughs deeply, maybe the way his nose feels behind my ear or they way he keeps his word, maybe it is a poem he writes or something he whispered, and sometimes – I’ll admit – it is the way a man wears his Carhartt’s.

But I want to stop needing approval from a lover. I am enough. I must believe this, not to the extent that I am island, but definitely to the extent that I am my own person.

Then,

I want to let love come back to me, fill the scars, make a new bed, sew a stitch where the quilt needs mending. I want love in me like a natural disaster, flooding, sliding, unstoppable, inevitable, beautiful and painful and real, sacrificial. And I want it to be life-long.