Tazia Machl, Staff Writer
much like everybody else, to my deep dismay, i view the new year with a spirit of recreation. throwing pennies in the pool, i wish on who i’ll be in 2024. this year, i’ll be nothing but good. with steadfast determination, i aim for perfection. i long to become a work of art, marveled at not for its beauty but for its mercurial emotions, its quiet courage, its calamitous wonder.
i must be good. i must be good. i will be good.
i stop eating: dairy, grains, sugars, oils. i bleach my hair in homage to marilyn, i write prose on napkins like sylvia, i go wild like rebekah, i fall apart like all the mad women before me. i am reinventing myself for 2024 because all my pasts so far have failed me. to starve my body, to fry my hair, to fall into ruin for a poem’s verse and perish in the squalor of unrequited love for a sense of passion, oh is it so worthwhile.
i am feeling so ill from all of it: the banality, the uncertainty, the tense anxiety. it dominates my life like the looming dusk dominates autumn daylight. will we be alright past february? i wake up every night with nothing to hold. will i wake up one day and forget the sound of your laugh? the size of your hands? your hair, your voice, i wish i could keep those memories eternal in a jar or summer light. if, when i forget you, who will i be?
if i cease this constant reinvention, if i remain a stagnant sculpture of melodrama, you’ll roam away like a tide fleeing from the moon. who am i if not the lord’s court jester? i am everybody’s girl and it is so lonely that way.
how scared i am of losing you, my darling muse. don’t go- i’ll wish upon eyelashes and airplanes i pretend are shooting stars. when you turn your back, i flick a stolen penny into a chicago fountain. in 2024, i’ll be perfect.
for more super cool sad poems, follow @prose_by_tazia on instagram.
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