It’s the end of the year and everyone is rushing around trying to fix their lives by midnight. We’re all checking off to-do lists and trying to lose 10 pounds before the ball drops, marking the end of another year and asking what we have to show for the last 365 days.
Between old resolutions and new the hours in a day don’t seem worth it anymore. The year feels tight and by December most of us are feeling so claustrophobic we’re afraid to go to bed. We regret the most particular things; a cupcake we ate on St. Patrick’s Day, spending $20 on a shall we only wore twice {but looked so good in}, 2 tickets to a Bills game we never went to - the list goes on until our regrets have become this year’s resolutions and we’re reciting them in front of the mirror on the last Thursday in December. We’re talking to ourselves and driving down one ways, the wrong way, tweezing our eyebrows in traffic.
In my old apartment I would sit on the floor in-between the coffee table and couch and write the same way I do here, in this new apartment that is now mine. But here the walls are smaller except there are more of them, and the hallways feel wider and I feel smaller but my legs are cramping and my arms still can’t stretch out fully.
My memories are different here. You’ve been here but I don’t like to remember it. We’ve slept in my bedroom but after you left, I had to paint the walls and move the furniture to try and forget you. It got so bad that I started leaving my window open at night and shiver beneath blankets so your smell will be pushed out. I wake up and am greeted by the door you walked out of. The door I let you walk out of. I'm constantly reminded that there will never be a you & I: it’s just a you and then a me. Separate entities.
I’m choking on my coffee and that brings me back to reality. With only a few days left of the year, this is how I’ll go – death by my pumpkin spice. Everything I was just dwelling on seems less important as I gasp. Elaina is laughing and I’m signaling for help but she doesn’t move. It is moments like this that I wonder if she’d let me die if I was choking on a chicken bone and not a liquid.
I’m writing prose on my walls, on my bathroom mirror and my dashboard. This year I’m going to change, I’m going to fix my shitty posture and paint my nails every day. I’m going to forget all about your soft expression. This time I am writing declarations not resolutions. And this time, I'm telling Elaina they will stick. I tell her that they say desperation leaves us empty and hollow. He told me it made him crazy, it left his soul in his gut and his pockets empty. Elaina says it was Global Warming that sent us all up a wall this year. I say it was the fact that I wore the wrong shoes on our first date.
