BANG OUT

I will stop.   I will stop it.  I will stop doing it.  I will stop doing it so much.  I will do it less than before.  I will significantly reduce the number of times during which I can be said to be the author of this particular deed.

When I said that I would stop it last year, I was persuaded by a newness which proved—as the hours multiplied into days, the days to weeks, the weeks to months, etcetera, leading inexorably to this brink, this cusp, this threshold in front of which we now find ourselves poised—not to be newness at all, but rather feckless, reiterative, a shabby incarnation of Before.

Friends, breathe in!  For a better, newer newness hovers in the fresh night air.  Do not mistake this for a pleasantry; when I say the air is fresh tonight I mean that the atmosphere is new entirely, as if the night had slipped out of its husk and birthed a new thing, full of promise, void of recognition, in which my face is yet unknown, as are my problems—specifically, my tendency to persist in the execution of that which I now foreswear: it.

I know that you know that I know that it is on account of it and the repetition of it by me that you have brought me here, into the semi-circle of your concern.  You have furnished me with sundry writing utensils, scraps of paper, and this cord of firewood.  I stand now at the edge of your man-sized pit and say unto you:

It will not be done by me.  When I see someone else doing it or it happening in to anyone even in the slightest fashion, I will take the utmost measures to avoid it.  I will aspirate deeply and also move with many long, loping strides in the opposite direction, and if need be I will seal myself into the light and sound-proof sarcophagus which you have so generously built for me, and when the fires of temptation have passed, though I may have burned with longing, yea will I have resisted it, and thoughts of it will flow from my mind like water from a melted polar ice cap.

And friends, though it exceeds me and contains me, thrills, destroys, and resurrects me, though it sows me with a fresh longing no matter what depths and lows I have been brought to by it, I will stop, I will stop it, I will stop doing it, I will do it much less than before.

Copyright © 2010, Amanda Davidson