January

Dear January,

I came to you as I do every year, with all my hopes and fears tightly bunched in my fists, stretched out towards you.

I am in love with the newness of you. Every year, though we know the hard truth that yesterday and tomorrow are more similar than different, you give us hope that perhaps they are not. Perhaps they can be different as night and day.

At times, I admit, I have even been lulled into a false sense of security from your seduction. What I always forget, what you always whisper and never proclaim, is that your magic does not work without my willpower. We can begin again, yes, but life is not a platter of delectables waiting to be plucked. Life occurs in the fission between hard work, divinity and happenstance.

Mostly though, I love you for the resolve you instil in me. I chant “I will I will I will” and “I can I can I can” and I believe it. Never have I felt it more than this year. You have given me the courage to declare my dreams out loud. To throw out to the skies my hopes and fears, unabashedly focused on being true to myself. Not just present day me, but me of decades ago who used to whisper her dreams to the trees and lasso her future to the craft of storytelling. With a shudder and a sigh, January, I show you who I really am.

Take what you will, this is all of me.

Until next time,

Yours,

Naliaka O.