Stuffing

I've just been reading the blog post I wrote at almost exactly this time last year. I was twenty-nine years old, flat, work-worn, weary and anxious of letting Christmas pass me by. Is this year any different except for the fact that (gasp!) I'm thirty now?! No, I am feeling almost exactly the same, maybe flatter. Kind of like this year has knocked the stuffing out of me in a variety of ways. I look at how few blog posts I have written since then, a lack of my words on this page perhaps, but that doesn't mean my words haven't spilled out and scattered elsewhere over the year. They have danced and shimmered out, so so many of them, threaded excitedly, lavishly and warmly into a fabric that slowly came threadbare and hopeless in my hands, wastefully fraying into unexpected nothingness. Those ones took my best stuffing as they went. Oh it went back in, not clean and fluffy anymore but tangled up with grit and dirt and flatness. Other words have sprung out of me carelessly and thoughtlessly, taking bits of stuffing out of other people. More recently, words I didn't even know I had, came out in the right order despite myself, and have left me still stuttering and speechless because somehow they have molded an unbelievable and fantastic opportunity for me to give people words in this new year in a very different way and place from before. Lots of carefully chosen words will need to be knitted and purled before then to cast off the transition without holes or unravelling. I will have to choose to weave in the words from myself and from others that bring my finest stuffing back, ignoring the ones that leave me tatty and mouldered. So I wish both for you and for myself the best quality stuffing this festive season. To fill us back up with soft and springy hope and to restore us for whatever weird, wretched and wonderful things the next year on this loop-the-loop may bring.