I have heard that every seven years our cells finish replenishing themselves. Every seven years we are a new person. Next year is my year. I feel it starting.
My hairstylist person says: your hair feels different, the texture. I think it's getting straighter. Freckles are back from my childhood of bike wrecks and notebooks, spotting a skin that is turning golden, softening into my mother's skin. I wear corduroy skirts and ballet slippers. I remember things I am told. I keep thinking of that Sex and the City commercial on TBS, where Carrie Bradshaw's plaintive, treble voice says: I am someone who is looking for love.
I am someone who is looking for love. I am someone who can be alone. I am a girl who is amazed by frogs. I am a girl who sings in the attic. I am a girl you will not let go.
The novel is spilling from me, two chapters to go. But now I feel like the person speaking is me. The character was not me. I made her up! I made her on purpose to be different--physically, emotionally, the things she said, what happened. But then what happened to her happened to me, and I am reacting as me. I am letting go of her. Letting her/me speak and seeing where it takes us. All last spring, I made an outline, twenty pages, out of events and index cards. I spread them on my floor. I wrote it on my hand. I have been crossing scenes off as I write them, fill them in. Now, so close to the end, everything is unraveling, my careful inked plans.
I am ready, for the first time in my life, to let go of my life. To let what happens, happen. This is it. Here it comes.
