Laura Killgore

New Year, New Life

A new year. This year is the first year in 10 years I will live alone. The first year in 10 years I am able to make my own decisions, and live my own life. First time for what seems like centuries I am free. Resolutions seem weak paltry things for the number of things that have changed in my life as of 2021. You see, my husband, a man I was married to when I was too young to legally drink and I gave a third of my life to, decided he would rather have one of my friends than me. I can no longer feel this as a loss, the losing is done and has been cemented in three weeks of bargaining. The pain was felt during holidays not only spent without family due to Covid-19, but without tradition 10 years in the making. 2021, is time for healing. Time for living forward, but keeping full record and knowledge of the past, not to be possessed by it but to learn from it. I am done being a pawn and possession, a good wife, quiet, only to be stepped on to achieve satisfaction, or get something. 2021 I will learn what it feels like to actually be loved, to have people care, for caring sake not for the sake of what they can get if they seem caring. I am once again allowed to cut my hair, and have friends, to listen to music I love, and heal because I can once again believe I am worth healing, caring for, and having friends. This is my fresh start. My life has been scraped down to foundations, and my proverbial fields torched by a man and a friend I loved. However, as after a brush fire, the green sprouts are pushing back through and in a few months the only signs of fire, will be the snags and even they may still yet live. My life is all a new start. This is a story free of politics, for when your house is burning, you pay little attention to your neighbor’s flood. 2020 for me started well, I went back to school, I began to live again. 2021 is rewriting that history, showing me my own blind trust and the lies I believed. As the cow who was bought for a taste of milk, and then imprisoned for a life an open gate, though it be wreathed in thorns, is sweet for its promise of freedom, no matter the marks left. I have found my companions, friends who stayed away because of a man they didn’t like to hear speak and herald his own intelligence. A dog, new to me, but also left like me, banished from what he thought would be his forever home. We are the rejects he and I, we are building our own life, trapped by time and responsibility, but free to live as we see fit. My new year is a herald of a new life, building my own future, with permissions neither begged, nor bestowed. I rebuild who I was before, before the 10 years of ham handed reshaping, when my personality was my own. Though now older, wiser, and more understanding of the flaws of others, as I have been shown many of mine. My resolutions are to learn to forgive, without the curse of forgetting. To live not having to ask permission, and to not apologize for being alive. To realize that I am not the problem, even though I have many, and I do not and did not deserve for my world to be demolished. However, I am determined to be made better for it. To be unashamed of the person I am becoming, finding value in me and not relying on the evaluation of others. These are not resolutions, not truly, they are survival. They pit me for the bad days. Some days are like open wounds, everything hurts. These are my poultice and bandage, a shield for the days when things seem like I am drowning. So these resolutions are for the good days when I can feel the ground beneath my feet and smell the freedom in the air, as well as the bad when I wake up in the morning and wonder how my heart doesn’t clatter when it beats as its nothing more than broken pieces. I have been broken, but I will not stay that way, instead I will be reforged, standing under my own power sustained by a religious faith like an oak, defiant of my pain. Happy New Life.