We hold the new year like a fragile, paper thin, glass origami, afraid to breathe or move, afraid to shatter the delusion of all the infinite, brilliant possibilities. ( 00:37 // 1.1.18 )

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I like New Year’s Eve.

Despite the insane amount of emphasis that people put on it and the corresponding pressure that they place on the idea of a new start, I like the holiday with all its false hope and glitter and sparkling promises that we make to ourselves only to break them days later. I like it. Which is unlike me.

I tend to abhor anything cheesy or mawkish or that gets an exorbitant amount of buzz and chatter. New Year’s Eve is like the trendy holiday, the one that shows up annually and gets all decked out and dressed up and suddenly becomes desirable like the latest piece of influencer clothing. It’s that overrated girl from high school who was somehow crowned homecoming queen and prom queen and senior class president even though she had the personality of a gnat. It’s the latest superfood or health trend that makes us all suddenly start eating strange seeds found in the Mojave Desert or drinking alpaca milk because it’s full of antioxidants or amino acids or whatever other nutrient scientists tell us we don’t consume enough.

But despite all of this, I like it.

I love the reflections, the rejuvenated ambitions, the reminiscing and remembering. The pure potential, the tabula rasa that waits for us to draw on it, sketching out goals, plans, dreams, and wild adventures. The thought that anything can happen, anything can be done.

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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.” // TS Eliot

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I love the reviews. The newspaper and magazine articles about the Top 10 ___ of the Year, and this year, since the decade is drawing to a close and launching us into another set of ten years, the last are being recapped, wrapped up, and tied with a bow.

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“But days all move along just the same, whether you want them to or not – whether you spend them holding your breath or trying to lose it.” ( 18:42 // 12.30.15 )

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I’m a nostalgic creature. All it takes is one orange leaf falling from a tree or the rustle of a breeze or a whisper of a scent of something that echoes of another time, and suddenly, I’m chasing after a white rabbit and following him down a hole of old haunts and hopes.

For better or worse, I fall down, down, down into the abyss of ancient history.

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If there was a Ghost of New Years Past, he would show me a range of scenes from this last decade, washed over in grit and glitter, remembered in the glow of romanticized rose-colored filters, and saturated with truths and lies and the inevitable edits that come from days of distance from the original moment.

2011: Sitting on my brother’s living room floor, watching The Nightmare Before Christmas with my sister-in-law and younger sisters, writing song lyrics in a worn-out notebook, swearing to myself and others that I wouldn’t make the same choices I had been, that I’d change my ways.

2012: Another night of chronic illness, too tired and sick to hold my head up or stay awake to watch the ball drop and ring in a new 365 days. Bones burning. Muscles aching. Trying to remember what it felt like to feel good, to feel okay.

2014: Surrounded by friends and family, counting down altogether in one defiant, slightly unsynchronized voice, and daring him to look me in the eyes and break our months-long silence but being too afraid, too timid, too uncertain to do it myself.

2017: Finally breaking our years-long silence and returning to what we used to be, if only for one wonderful Cinderella night. Playing games, teasing, eating, laughing. Letting it warm me from the inside out, giving me a hope I hadn’t felt for a while, a hope I thought had died two Februarys ago.

2018: Too many red solo cups and not enough discernment. Sitting at the top of the stairs with sort of friends, watching the night unfold. Looking out the window at the stars, like drops of sugar in a silky sky. Wishing I was anywhere else.

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Hope is dangerous.

It’s a risk, a precarious promise that often breaks itself and then you.

But it’s what keeps us going. It’s what kicks us out of bed in the morning, what pushes us through the cold, cruel world where March is endless and April makes a mockery of our tentative, hesitant optimism. It’s what nudges us to give second and third and fourth chances, to sign our names to dotted lines, to catch their eye across a crowded room and not look away. It’s a prayer we hold on the tip of our tongues, almost afraid to utter, a perilous pairing of syllables that could destroy us if gone unanswered. It’s what plays the drum that keeps our hearts in rhythm, that leads the battle cries we whisper to ourselves in the dark.

It’s what urges us to keep breathing even when we feel like we’re suffocating.

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I don’t make resolutions.

After a particularly disastrous one that crashed and burned seven days into 2012, I stopped. I quit the façade so I wouldn’t have the chance to quit the real thing later on.

Resolutions are so final, so intimidating, so daunting and taunting and tall.

They are constructed to crumble, to be temporary and tenuous, like a Lego creation or a house of cards: built for the sake of building but ultimately meant to be broken down.

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Like a sparkler or a firework, the hype and hope and heights of New Year’s burst and dazzle and then sizzle and fade, leaving us with smoke shadows in the sky of what once was.

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New Year’s gives us hope.

However foolish or false or frail it may be, for a few fleeting moments or hours or days, we have a refreshed, revitalized hope for something better and brighter beyond the faded, beaten beauty of last year’s follies and bruises and bad ideas.

Assailed by the garish and the glittering, the golden and gilded gore of a champagne-infused holiday, suffocated and smothered in the sparkling, spectacular, spent, and spectral of the last fantastical celebration of a specific, set amount of calendar days in a year in a decade in a century in a millennium, we raise our glasses and our expectations and let our hearts flutter and fly to dizzying heights of hope, if all for just a blissfully incandescent, effervescent, phosphorescent moment.

We count down, exhaling all the last bits of bitterness and brokenness and brilliance of the last year, emptying out our lungs to eagerly fill them up again when the clock strikes twelve, and then we hold our breaths, afraid to let them out lest we never get them back in the same transcendent, iridescent way, afraid to let the moment become evanescent and let the seconds tick along and become senescent.

But we do and they do. And we carry along with our lives, settling back into our Sisyphean routines of mundanity, ever so slowly walking uphill until we reach the next shining, shimmering peak of another December 31st.

And so it goes. Hope, rinse, repeat.