360 Days of Cowardice: A New Year's Resolution

Just give up a few days, or about two weeks with good temperaments, add a tradition and a shared room with central heating, and then these 360 days of cowardice will end wiped clean. Tomorrow begins the fresh start to shuffle on, shuffle on.

Courage won't fix this long unmarked rotation.  Warmth and walls will.  Music and lights will.  Dining room tables, fireplaces or TVs, one item to localize the bound people, the small things that will count the steps that shuffle on, shuffle on. 

The other 360 days watch the ground move, with head tilted to follow the shooting stars in the dirt that shift regularly.  These feet move a little too, they chug, toe tips and organic weeds fill up worlds as they shuffle on, shuffle on. 

And at the near end of a complete twirl, the shuffling looks up, and the plodding march of it will prevent dizziness but also let time clarify the image of the patch of dense black air that is right now falling by in a reaching, streaming wave to the sky.  A simple turn to face it would bring it well within reach, but until then it passes alongside the river, just a little slippery, a little reflective, always flowing and always waving, there against the watery body, waving and slipping, waiting and leaving.

The shuffling will pick up, it will.  The head will turn back to the gravely contrails that carve the map of the path from home, and the finer the line the faster the return.  And once returned, nothing is changed, except time and its children wrinkles and a few pounds of heaviness more.  Wisdom--they say--nothing radical about a 360 degree turn.

There's only one way out of the chainlink circle, but conversation is a learned language.  It doesn't come with any universal grammar or culture or community that is not chosen.  In this way is everything second class but first in the heart.  In this way out is perpetual testing, willful and with raised hands, raised to that there passing patch of hoarse words and numb hands, reaching its dark fullness in offering, with patient love.  

But two weeks is the key, is enough, is fine, could do the trick, with good temperaments of course. Two weeks inside, between and under, one roof and a few walls and lifetimes of grounded dirt, will hold family again in memories of the dreams shared but never given to each other.  Two weeks will forget and forgive 360 days of cowardice, and the next 360 will shuffle on, shuffle on.