New Year’s
Part I: Glitter and Doom
Un-Christmas is what it feels like as a kid. A miserly, mirror-image sort of holiday where grown-ups get sloppy and scare us away with mistletoe.
It isn’t until Sue’s sleepover in the seventh grade that First Night becomes associated with actual pain for me. A torturous earache keeps me secluded and only more miserable the closer we get to midnight. Compounding my disappointment at missing out on all the fun, I discover I can’t actually heal myself through prayer as Jesus expects me to do, according to the tenets of Christian Science. I sure can suffer in silence, though.
Before long, pain of one sort or another becomes a mainstay of every December 31st. At a high school party, my wasted friends confess that my sobriety is a total buzzkill. “But I am naturally high!” I protest over the music, jumping into the mosh pit that is writhing in Katy’s kitchen. The mass of limbs seems to disentangle on contact and everyone but me slips out the slider for a hit.
In another image of New Year’s debauchery, bodies are strewn across Sarah’s sandy carpet like Bellamy’s pirates, spit up by the sea. I alone remain awake, staring out the bay window, studying the dance of moonlight on wine-dark waves. Most of the kids in the room would actually catch that Homer reference if only they’d gone easier on the drink, I reflect.
As it is, I have to weave between their wrecked bodies as I make my way to the bathroom. Staring down my own image in the massive mirror above the sink, I ask the eternal questions. Who am I? Why am I here? And what is that splash of burgundy in my periphery? Turning, I see that someone has missed the toilet bowl and left a vile rivulet running down the white porcelain.
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And what about you? I ask myself. What mark will you leave?
My actual hatred for this holiday crystalizes at a frigid Boston countdown on the cusp of 1992 when my first love ditches me for his friends, confirming my suspicion that New Year’s is destined to suck, forever and always. It is a shit move on his part, abruptly cutting me loose in an unfamiliar place, removing the drag so he can party unfettered. All night, I sit anchored in a dingy corner, mourning our complicity born of shared solitude among the dunes and something more than mere circumstance.
Decades will pass before I can see this episode replayed from the other side of my hurt. In this version — equally true — I am the one preparing to unmoor, getting ready to abandon him for college just days after the party. In the time that is left us, I want to go deep. He would rather get high. Who can blame him for shipping out with his rowdy crew at the first opportunity?
Back then I can only register this episode as a searing rejection blazoned sensationally across the New Year’s sky. This holiday clearly hates me, I conclude. And so I’ll hate it back.
To get ahead of things, I start spewing cynicisms gleaned from a decade of disappointing First Nights. It’s all that forced glee I can’t abide, I explain to anyone who cares to listen. The false promises to self. The inevitable disappointment of 12:01. The absurdity of celebrating an arbitrary moment in time just because Pope Gregory XIII declared it must be so 400 years ago.
No one seems to share my distaste for this annual invitation to indulge.
If only I drank, or smoked, or did drugs, I think to myself. Then maybe I could just lighten up and stop killing everyone’s buzz…
