New Year Resolutions (belated)

On the eve of the Year of the Rooster, I solemnly resolve to…

1. Actually finish a book, instead of leafing through its pages and abandoning it to the pile at the bottom of my bed.
2. Read more fiction, again.  Overcome the emotional numbness I feel when faced with fictional characters. Sustain my way through a narrative instead of feeling lost, confused, tired, disoriented; persist.
3. Lose weight.
4. Improve my mental health through plausible means, e.g. light exercise, light reading, light social interaction, vitamins both metaphorical and literal.
5. Stick to the job I have and not moan about it.
6. Save up, like the good girl  I’m supposed to be.
7. Keep trysts with strangers to a minimum.
8. Put love before sex.
9. Stop flirting with implausible and impossible people, from those hopelessly out of my league to no-hopers.
10. Write like there’s no tomorrow, once again, however crap or inconsistent the outcome.
11. Make new friends, instead of rehabilitating old friendships which are half-desiccated anyway.
12. Travel to somewhere familiar yet exotic – a place I’ve firmly left behind, for instance, now irrevocably changed.
13. Take better care of my aging skin, accept that my hair is greying, and greying fast; embrace the inevitable.
14. Love the old people in my life – a.k.a. my parents, more, and match that love with actions big and small. From swallowing my anger to pouring them cups of tea, be the filial daughter I once thought I would be.
15. Hold on; keep on keeping on. Find the green light, locate the Yellow Brick Road, book my plane ticket to a place beyond the proverbial rainbow.
16. And if there’s no green light, no Yellow Brick Road, no rainbow at the end of the tunnel, accept loneliness at its most crushing, and learn to find hope in small places.

Because, at the end of the day, there but for the grace of God go I… …I know, deep down, that it could easily have been me, the homeless man in the subway, the hanged man in his own living room, the terrified inmate in  the care centre.

Happy New Year (to no one in particular), and God bless!