I started the list in the dark of the year because a diary had begun to sound like a performance and a resolution like a threat. The list was only of things that had, on that day, remained possible. A walk to the end of the pier. A letter addressed and not sealed. Soup that used the stems. I wrote in pencil. Weather, I had learned, is a better editor than shame. Some lines were rubbed out by February not because they had failed but because the day had offered a different possibility and I did not want the paper to sulk about it. The list is not advice. It is a record of a season that did not ask me to become a new person, only to keep the old one warm enough to continue.#
This is an excerpt. The complete piece is in the print and digital edition of Issue 04.