Friday Write #157

look closer, read further

Friends,

At last party of the season and the first of 2026, I drank seltzer and ate potato chips while my friend scraped my thenar eminence¹ with the backside of a butter knife. I met a cat who supposedly knows over a dozen tricks but all he did for me was hide under the bed. I briefly joined a sing-along of “Norwegian Wood.”

I was filled with more love and optimism than usual because I’d made what felt like two keepable resolutions for once in my life. No more “I’ll write daily” or “I’ll drink the proper amount of water,” both of which have proved impossible. I’m talking really low-bar goals, and here they are:

Night Fireworks no. 77 Jinta Hirayama

Resolution 1:

Open the document of my book every day. Not the one I’m under contract for, but the one I’ve been messing with for years now. I don’t even have to type in it. All I have to do is open it up, read a sentence or two, and remind myself that this is a thing I want to complete.

Resolution 2:

Spend ten minutes a day doing something I don’t normally do. Yesterday it was practicing the guitar. Today I’m going to try out my new gouache set. I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow. Maybe write a letter? The goal here is creativity for creativity’s sake—process over product.

That’s it. Of course there are other things I hope for, but I’m going to focus on those two. Maybe they’ll work out for me.

What are your resolutions for the New Year?

Of course I looked up poems about resolutions, and I found this poem by Joseph Brodsky, which I place here less for itself than for an essay Alex Estes wrote about it, in which he reflects on his long-standing tradition of rereading Brodsky’s poem every year. Though Estes admits to an initial misreading of the poem, his understanding has changed and deepened over time.

And so Brodsky’s poem, he writes, “will sit there, in the back of my mind, reminding me that it’s my job as a reader to look closer, to read further, to think and feel more.”

Looking closer, reading further, and thinking and feeling more are also pretty good resolutions—not just for the coming year, but for the rest of your life.

Today your prompt is to type your resolutions into the comments.

Just kidding. Though I’d welcome it.

The real prompt is:

Write “What is this?” at the top of a page (from Brodsky’s second stanza), and then go from there, however you see fit.

Happy New Year.

Emily

1. What an amazing name, right? It’s just the fat part of your hand below your thumb. “The thumb roast” I heard someone call it. My friend—a massage therapist—was doing myofascial release.