It's December's end, it's that time again. Before you make another resolution, you could consider this: 2015 is unwritten.
Clean. Blank, unraveling spaces. A year from now, there will be a story of days.
It can be anything. How do you want it to begin? With a promise you won't keep?
I love the sensual potentiality of unknown possibility. As a writer, I am both terrified and seduced by a blank page. It is a wonderful thing, to sit before something unwritten and believe that what will come next is going to be amazing. I love the lustful medium of white space, the sultry staccato of the blinking cursor. Speaking to me. What will you say, Nicole? Maybe it will be beautiful. Maybe it will make someone cry. Maybe you will be changed. Maybe you will be terrible. Or wonderful, maybe.
Or maybe. Nothing. I can never tell. But I still try to write it anyway.
How will you write the story of the year ahead?
There are better writers than I who can tell you how to try to write it.
"Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper." -Ray Bradbury
Photo credit: Tim Victor, courtesy Simon and Schuster
"The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it."-Alain Robbe-Grillet
"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."-Ernest Hemingway
Photo credit: Yousef Karsh, 1957
I suppose what I want to tell you is that 2015 is a story that is only yours for the telling. What do you want to say?
I hope the blank pages of this year are filled to the margins with mayhem,with mirth and wonderful, delicious madness. I hope you love hard and kiss someone wonderful, full on the mouth. I hope you reach for the biggest, fattest plums from the tree of wonderful things.
I hope, at story's end, you look in the mirror (rearview or otherwise) and are seduced by the gleam of your own face.
As for resolutions? I hope you don't make any promises that will only let you like yourself less.
Why not promise instead to look blindly, expectantly upon the edge of something wonderful, something undone. A year, your year, is waiting to be desired (like a lover waiting at the edge of the bed unbuttoning her blouse).
What will you do next?
I hope you write your year, 2015, in broad sweeping strokes.
If you are looking at the blank space and you can't figure out how to begin without a resolution, just start like Hemingway and write something true. One true thing.
Write: I am alive.
And then go out and prove it.
Peace out, 2014.