Predictions

January 11th, 2024

After the clouded, sugar coated cavity-inducing, dreamy creamy holiday season, I’m back with more Soft Visions! First, I want to apologize for my inconsistency during the holiday season. Retail mania, excessive gift-spending, and beloved travels momentarily capped my pen. Second, happy New Year! 

Woohoo! 2024! That is, if you celebrate. If you do not celebrate, kudos to you – though I invite you to remember, time is the person rushing to their gate fresh off a delayed and rerouted plane. Time is the ocean shifting tides, taking your pearly shelly sandcastle with it. Time is the wrinkle on your mother’s forehead that digs deeper with every visit home. Time is the relentless rise and set sun cycle, and that itch you get when you’re already tucked into bed that pesters, did you set your alarms?  Time is fickle, and time is forever. Might as well tip your bulbous wine glass of red tongue drying mortality and celebrate (or mourn, your choice) the tick of seconds seconds seconds. One. Two. Three. Two. One. Happy New Year! 

New Years is either the cycle of trial and error shattering, or a free registration for the self-help rat race. Whichever way your perception leans, we as humans abide by the calendar. We schedule our jobs and free-time and generosity around date-proclaimed holidays. What I like about New Years, more than I like the costumes and shamrocks and firecrackers and cutout cookies,  is the newfound intent. Whether this drive is birthed from self-loathing or curiosity – who cares! People are trying. 

There is this invisible fault line that all of our decisions see-saw over. Their intended direction and the beside what-if ‘s  balancing on stagnancy. New Years rattles the paralytics of initiative and kickstarts self-motivation into overdrive. Yes, I know… Balance… Moderation. Our comfort words. 

But isn’t the excess thrilling? 

I am a New Years enthusiast. I put myself pretty on a pedestal and poke at my predictions. I like to call my aspirations predictions rather than goals or resolutions as a sort of self- insurance policy. In all of my writings and all of my tricks, I talk about time-bending. Even though New Years is an exclamation of linearity, I use its annual stamp as the starting point of my time dive. I see my future self and all of her gems and joys, triumphs and failures, and I talk to her. I call to her from where I write today, my mother’s dining room table in Pennsylvania, and I ask her how she did it all.

Her steps, her scribbles, her scrapes and bruises map out my sought and strategy.

Future me is a surfer. She stands up on waves and throttles face first taking in mouthfuls of seafoam. She knows the lingo; break, mush, swell, Jake – which she undoubtedly was. She read an unnecessary amount of books about surfing, and rode the LIRR far too many hours out to Montauk. She definitely siked herself out a few times, but she was definitely too stubborn to be the reason she failed to learn. She lives by the time of waves now, even in the city. If the surf is good she’s unavailable, and she cares less about more. Future me is a surfer. 

Future me ran her first half-marathon. She trained for hours, and sacrificed the idea of free time. Long runs. Compression. Electrolytes. Yoga. Speed-work. Rest days. Protein. Her body became top-priority again, and she finally understood her frame is her one true home. Distances and doubt were the cocktail she downed for months until her feet moved faster than her thoughts. Worn-in shoes and willpower. Future me ran her first half-marathon.

Future me is employed for her writing. Her hours of poems/applications/reviews/newsletters/interviews/coverletters congealed during the right moment in time to secure her a position where she writes to the world. Whatever occupies the space of topic is besides the matter – she writes for work, and works to write! Future me is employed for her writing.

Future me is working really hard and celebrating what it means to be alive, on Earth, in a body, with all the time she can hold in a moment.