1. The First Handful

Maybe this is the romantic in me. Or what little of the artist's heart that I have, my taste for melodrama and starting things. But in the wake of this aweful year, I feel like I am grasping at straws. I never knew what grasping-at-straws literally means. Is it from the gamble of drawing straws, hoping against hope not to draw the short one? Does it mean grabbing for something else and only ending up with useless straw? All I know is that it doesn't bode well. And I am unsatisfied with it. I don't want to grasp at straws, even if it means wrestling with hard things. With lies I've told myself. Lies we've told each other. Truths that shouldn't be true. Truths that should be. 

Handfuls of world, of real things. Big things. Hopeful things. Of things as they are, and things as they should be. As the year turns another number, and I round another year older, I want to at least be more aware of these things. I can't hold the world in my hands. I can't fix the bleeding, broken thing that it is. There's too much humanity, and not enough of it. And I don't know how to handle myself, adding even one more human to the equation sends me running for the hills. 

So this is my little toddler self, sitting in the mud where I've found myself, holding on with all that I can to all that I can, and letting the rest go. I want to recognize myself and the circumstances that I find myself. Maybe that means letting my melodrama run amok. But this is a start.