I don’t make resolutions. It’s not that I’m so perfect. It’s that I change and change my mind too much. I am too fluid for resolve, I think. I have never got a Christmas bonus. I have never held a job for more than a year or so. When I’m stable, I long for instability and change. When I’m unstable, I long for stability. Meanwhile, I’m assaulted by extremes. My life comes in bursts, in chapters. Chapters of love too bright to burn evenly or for long. Chapters of loneliness too dull to be broken quickly. Chapters of boredom too. Too many days of boredom. Chapters of excess and busyness. Opportunity, too. Opportunity mobs me and then moves on.

I need to shuffle my life, I think. If you took all the days of my life and put them on playing cards you might be able to sort them into a pleasant life. But it doesn’t come that way. It doesn’t go that way. My life is all flushes. A flush of work. A flush of boredom. And I don’t know what sort of resolution might fix that.

And I’m becoming a little uneasy with this exile. Some days it is too easy, in a way. But I’m feeling a little too much like a witness. I don’t want to sit in the front row of life. And I’m too used to this seat. Before I become the chair and the chair becomes me, I think I should stand up. Getting up will cause a scene. But that’s just it, isn’t it? I need to cause a scene. I will stand up in the dark hall and I will bother the actors already acting. And that’s just the point. And I will get up on that stage and give up the chair and the first row and the other dark witnesses and I will take that stage and I will, after all, act on life’s stage.

But not quite yet. It’s all arbitrary now but I still want to make it through to the end of April, say. And wherever I go, whatever I do or say when I take up the stage of life again, there will be that time where I did this. The witness has nothing but posterity. Posterity and this lovely seat from which to watch and shake my head and click my tongue.

SS