Closures

The two days before the year slides to its finish hold a complex brew of sentiments. Last night, I was heady with optimism, as a friend and I raised our glasses in a joint wish to seize our visions for the future. Then, this morning, I was barely ready to let a sentence go. How do you close one door and then so soon open another? How do you wrap things up and then prepare to leap again? The mind exhausts itself with such gymnastics. The cocoon of winter is deceptive, solstice nudging us away from sleep. And so the only thing to do is let the body fall and rise, each breath its own small victory, an unbending promise, the truest kind of faith.

Maya Stein