No More New Starts for Grace

Once you accept that things will never be different, they start to change

Illustration by Carmen Johns

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, who doesn’t feel right — but somehow makes the idea that a person could change impossible to conceptualize. The question the song has made diffuse but unavoidable is whether, in fact, nobody’s ever changing, especially not those for whom a new start is the rule rather than the exception.

God’s most sustaining gift to mankind is a new morning each day, a fresh jolt of vigor every morning, a new hope in each jolt, a new delusion in each hope.

A new morning each day: let the change in the light reflect the possibility of a change in my soul.

A new jolt of vigor: let the energy in my heart, regardless of its source, enact a spiritual renewal.

A new hope: I know there is work to be done. I know that earnestly. I believe I can do the work. I am strong. I am beautiful, no matter what you say.