New hopes.

twenty-one comes to me; I am al most ly unafraid, so I step forward to take its hand. I wrote a letter when I was 18 to this new age that I shall be. the letter's lost somewhere in the piles of past homes, but no doubt it contained the dreams and expectations that I know I will be able to meet, stand up with and tell: 'I've done you proud. 

I'm not exactly where and how you'd thought, but I am just how and where we should be for the moment. You are fine, you'll be fine dear, we are good.'

   And now of course I naturally look with restless eagerness at what more I can hope to see of the days enclosed within my coming age- well I see that those hopes already are untying themselves from the ground, becoming vast and sweeping notions like love and know and understand and create more. simple abstractions, really, that cannot possibly be kept tethered to a date or time or place of being. But they'll be there all the same, those bigsmall hopes, blanketing the coming twelvemonth until they are such an indivisible part of my rolling, white-speckled ether.
   So when I am waiting to take the hand of twenty-two, I will have found new hopes to tie over my own head and reach for.