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No More New Starts for Grace
Once you accept that things will never be different, they start to change
When I am gripped by the need for a new start, I am at my most passionate, my most charismatic. I am Vivien Leigh, choking back her tears at the end of Gone With the Wind, heaving my words out of the cavity of my breast: “After all…tomorrow is another day!” My sadness is almost overwhelming, but that sadness is in turn overwhelmed by the forward thrust of time, renewable and inexorable.
“This is a new start!” is a thought I love to feel ripple through my bod, though I rarely feel it any more. It is a sensation tinged with an exquisite kind of regret — a vague sense that whatever it is that has required me to launch myself into a new start was perhaps unfortunate, perhaps (arguably) shameful, but at least it isn’t permanent, and it doesn’t do to dwell on such things. A new start makes me Mary Poppins: suddenly serious, unsentimental, practically perfect in every way. This time I’ve fucking cracked it.
“New start now plz!” is an energizing thought capable of co-existing with the most recumbent, torpid banality. It is odd to reflect, for example, that the signature song of a band as prodigiously mediocre as Keane was called “Everybody’s Changing.” It’s a song that claims everybody’s changing — including the singer himself…
