New Years Resolutions
New Years Resolutions
Every year, exactly the same—
Multicolored pens, neatly lined notes, and candlelight.
Pen to paper, she would write
The same goals, always failing, though try as she might.
115 pounds. True love.
100k. And, above all, to quit that final vice—
What if you could have it all? At the time,
She’d pay any price.
But beneath the ink and hopeful tone
Lived a voice sharp as stone:
“You’re too lazy, your room’s always a mess.
You’ll never be happy; you’ll always live in distress.”
“You’re a fraud, you’re a fake,
You’re a chef who can’t even bake.”
Perfection was her master.
No matter how she excelled, she always felt like a disaster.
No room for flaws, no place to rest—
Her life a performance, a ceaseless test.
Time flew by, the years amassed,
A life weighed down by heartbreaks of the past.
She tried again, grit her teeth,
Obsessed with standards no one could meet.
And then, one year, the voices turned static.
Her world stopped; nothing mattered.
A diagnosis she did not choose,
A thief in the night, stealing her light.
Darkness fell, and she went numb.
Cancer.
“You have stage 4 cancer,” the doctor said,
Matter-of-fact, waiting for her to react.
The words stole her breath;
She had nothing to say—there was nothing left.
Falling, falling into a pit of despair.
“Is this real?”
She screamed, she cried, she cursed at God.
Shock and fear consumed her most days,
The goals she wrote each year now a haze.
Chemo carved her body thin,
Her eyes hollow, her clothes too big.
The scale- a weight she’d once desired,
But the joy was absent, hope had expired.
Her bank account filled with donations and grants,
Cancer’s cruel irony—her greatest chance.
100k, the number she’d dreamed for years,
Now meaningless, drowned in her tears.
Her riches now instead lay in the kindness of strangers,
In laughter, in love, in moments that lingered.
The perfectionist—once wound so tight—
Began to soften; her goals took flight.
One last goal she’d always made—
find true love. But what she craved
Had been buried inside all along:
A love for herself, denied and gone.
She looked at her frail body, cancer’s claim,
A lifetime lived in a fleeting frame.
Yet in the mirror, she saw something new—
An ugly caterpillar transformed and true,
So many years spent self bound into a cocoon,
Layered with judgment, hate and gloom.
But suffering split the shell apart
Revealing the vibrant colors of her heart
Her new goals were softer, simpler, and kind:
Feel the warm sun, savor the time.
Smile at strangers, enjoy the seasons’ changes,
Embrace the flaws that once sparked rages.
Cancer taught her what she couldn’t see:
The best part of life is to simply be.
And loving yourself is what sets you free.