:: Epigrams ::

The new year already feels old, because the old year has left me spent. I woke to the monsoon's raindance, and the last twelve months flashed by like three clipped acts of a film noir - bleak, grim, and lit only by the absence of light. I felt suitably nostalgic and wondered if growing older and growing old is actually one and one the same.

I feel old. The sort of cheerful - almost mindless - gaiety that seems to bubble at the edge of my sisters' laughter will no longer touch me. I'm like a parchment of faded ink; my youthful effervescent has been dried out by the physical and metaphorical deaths dotting the waning year. Age and wisdom are the synonymous epigrams marking this malleable age: I'm older, but still unwise, still uneducated, still resigned to life's whimsical sense of ebb-and-flow.

Happiness is not an option - someone once told me.
And I know. Peace - the less dramatic, the less poetic and the less desired sister of life's various ideals - is. My thoughts, like a fragmented whole, has a mysterious energy of their own today. Disquiet, tickling: what can I offer the new year that I couldn't and didn't for this last one?

***

And so we met again. You were my once-upon-a-time. Now I wish for you to be happy and shine - you might not have been my Orion, but you lit up the way for me in more ways than one. I hope she's a better constellation.

***

Happy new year, as we've been trained to say. Shalom, everyone.