"Dear Me"

December 31, 2011



Dear Me,

Isn’t it about time that you stop nit-picking your way through life with goals that atomize no more than a pin head? You’ve already stopped smoking, stopped swearing, stopped gaining weight, added a myriad of activities to fill your mind and your body. Improvements, you say? Listen, we are Siamese twins, fused together by the light that reflects on you in the mirror. Yeah, I get it. You want to look good, live longer, and make a difference. You look in the mirror and you see You. I look in back but can’t see anything anymore because I’m blind as mole in his den. I’m so blind You can’t even see me anymore.

Did all those ‘improvements’ bring peace to the world? Did fugitives get their bellies filled? Did children stop taking drugs? How about those crazy politicians; did you turn a new leaf in their lives? From what I see, all of your New Years’ Eve resolutions has added more stress to your pocketbook, decreased time allotment for extracurricular activities, and made you all the more self-conscious. Yes, yes, I know, you also put more money in the contributors box and tithed at church. But didn’t your grandson die anyway? Do all those self-improvements prevent last year’s earthquake? Did they erase greed in the corporate world? Or save your sister from breast cancer? A tuck here, a Lipo there, are you serious? A brick could fall from the sky any day and mess up that expensive hairdo, change the shade from bodacious brunette to reddish brown and your field of perception from bright and beautiful to fuzzy and fungus. Listen girl, you’ve contemplated your belly button long enough. We gotta talk.

Tomorrow begins a new year and its time to get radical. You can’t make those gray hairs and wrinkles not belong right where they are. And that mole on your chin, forget about it. It adds character. Lets face it. Look, you can’t save the world—Lord knows you’ve tried—and you can’t change the laws of nature, so why not resolve this year to save Me. Yeah, you heard right; save Me!

I remember the day our mother held you up to a mirror and said, “just look at that pretty little girl,” and you smiled at me because you saw me smiling at you. We made each other giggled. Those were the days of sunshine and flowers. I was the pink petal in your curly blonde hair and you were the light that shone down on both of us.

Today you look into the mirror and see only yourself while I fade near to death behind the black curtain of your obsessions. You may live to be a hundred, but I may die this year and if I do you will live the rest of your days in front of a mirror that no longer reflects anything.

This year, I beg of you, make a resolution to find Me. Scrape the barnacles off that mirror and lets take a walk together in the sunshine. Lets drink in the green air of rustling leaves. Let’s lift a rock and tickle a toad into motion. Let’s drink Kool-Aid and eat cookies, stomp in a puddle by the road and laugh till we wet ourselves. I can be found in the frisk of a kitten and the dance of a thousand butterflies. So forget all those shoulda-woulda-could-a’s you pronounce every year and bring me back into the light of your day. Together we can bask in the simple pleasures in life that cost nothing, demand nothing in return, and pays dividends that last forever. Find Me.



Happy New Year to Us

Love, Me.



Word count 619