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Irresolute

 


There are no resolutions for 2022. Instead, there's just beginning again, on top of a pile of half-done or barely begun drafts, with the idea that some things should be finished. This is the "new normal" after the pause.  

Normally, I'm ready to take down the decorations the day after New Year's and start that list of projects that I will definitely find a way to finish this year. I'd stack myself a TBR full of books that I've been meaning to read ever since I encountered them but before I actually started to read them. This year...this year I've spent the past several days compiling a list of all the pieces of writing I actually completed in 2021. Blog posts. Instagram poetry. Monthly bulletin boards. Zines. 


What if I'm not a finished kind of person? What if I'm the kind of person who enjoys hole-punching blog posts and treating them like a school project? Why haven't I been doing this for the past couple of years, tracking the shift and sway of stories that I work on through the seasons? I journal among their notes. Is the story or the journal the point?

Will I ever finish the chapbook compiling my 2020 poems or is it good enough that it lives in a similar folder, ready for the editing hand that might never appear? 

I'm not sure what I want to accomplish this year. There is a story that started out in a fantasy cliché (people meeting in a tavern) that might become something. Taverns feel so much more dangerous now. There are bears and not-wizards and caterpillar fairies that cost the main character her job (so far, it's been like rolling a piece of sticky-tape through the odds and ends of old ideas) and there will be a chicken companion and a fairy who might have once been a drop of blood and I don't know what else. Are there going to be giant, world-eating terrors? No. Who wants to walk through giant, world-eating terrors? (Then again, who can avoid it as  we walk past storefronts both empty and full of a consuming narrative that has already eaten itself into your soul, just like the worms that make jumping beans leap?) If 2022 becomes a folder wherein this plot wanders stark through my own days, bumping against what the dogs are doing (Merlin is sleeping, Arthur is sitting in James' office watching for his return from his booster shot) and what the weather and the backyard is creating that day, then that's probably fine. 

Worth, at the very least, a second read. 

-- Chrissa 



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