Flash Fiction: Unfinished Business & New Beginnings by Chiara De Giorgi

Welcome to The Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is “unfinished business.” In the great irony of the prompt, I am a bit late in posting two stories that are both about the New Year. Here’s to the rest of the year going a bit more punctually! -Val

This week’s story comes from Chiara De Giorgi. Chiara dreams, reads, edits texts, translates, and occasionally writes in two languages. She also has a lot of fun.

Unfinished Business & New Beginnings

by Chiara De Giorgi

Dear New Year,

May you be happy!

I don’t have any promises for you. I don’t have any propositions or resolutions either. What I do have, is a bunch of unfinished business from last years. All the things I decided to do or be in the past few years… I’ve been slowly working my way through them.

First example is a classic: the gym. My subscription is almost two years old, now. For a while I go three times a week, then I skip three months in a row, then I start going again. Every time I tell myself that what’s important is not the times I stop, but the times I start over. Quite silently – not to brag – I’ve managed to go once a week for the past four months now. Granted, once a week is not that much, but it’s once a week more often than I did the previous months. My goal: keep up with the good habit!

Another, related, topic is diet, or better: nutrition. Same story as the gym: I manage to cook and eat healthy food for a while, then do a cheat day, which becomes a cheat week, then a cheat month, and we’re back to square one. What I noticed, though, is that the “cheating times” have been getting shorter, although more frequent. As a result, I ended Old Year with less pounds on myself than I had at the beginning. If all goes well, when you’re finished I’ll be even slimmer.

(Excuse me while I bite into this chocolate bar. It’s been lying around since Christmas: another unfinished business from last year!)

I’m finally getting the language certification I started studying for years ago.

What else? Getting to the bottom of my TBR list seems a bit far-fetched, so I won’t even mention it. I could get to the bottom of this unfinished bottle of wine- easily done!

So, see: picking up the trail of my unfinished business from last years is the way to go. For the rest, I’ll just try to take one month at a time, tasting each moment, feeling alive.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: https://valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/