mmdcclxxxv

Jim & I

My New Year’s Resolution,
granted, a couple of weeks
early, is to stop being bitter.
About anything. Yes, how
improbable, how impossible
this sounds, you think. You
know me perhaps (improb-
able), and there is a lot to be
bitter about; a whole lot of
junk floating around about
which to be bitter, be you
me, or be you, well, you. Of
that, am I right or am I wrong?
Normally, I am able to look at
most anything happy and heart-
ily strive. After all, there are infin-
ite angles from which to look.
Is it necessary to cultivate the
bad stuff, then allow it to inte-
grate and to potentially over-
take? Even momentarily? I know
I do. So that makes it all my fault.
Which is...okay? Am I right or am I
right? But if I have nobody to blame
but myself, who then do I finally have?
I realize now, as I walk endlessly through
this city of mirrors that I am doomed. But
when you live in a city full of mirrors, you
might pass, as I am right at this very instant,
by a somewhat familiar face that has a smile
directed right at you, a face that, as its smile
shrinks or sort of sinks into itself, belongs to
a figure that is the template, the embodiment,
it seems to me, of sheer joy. There isn’t a

speck or a flicker of sarcasm. I know this
because I check very thoroughly when I en-
counter familiarity. Also, I have a very on-
going relationship with loss. Loss I know.
So this guy appears. And what do I do?
I say “Hey there, Mister. I have a fairly
good feeling that we’ve met before.” And

I say this in earnest, as I extend my idiot-
ic arm nearly smack into the mirror’s edge.