Years feel like they get tired and grim. January 1 feels like a clean slate and a fresh start, as if we’ve been released from prison with all the charges wiped from the record. This, we say, will be a better year. We’re climbing the walls on December 31, wondering if this horrible fucking year will ever end, waiting for the bells to dispel its ghostly miasma.
New Year’s is a story we tell ourselves, of course. It’s absolute bullshit. We all know it. But it’s a good story, so we keep on telling it. Every year, on and on. And who’s to say that, one golden year, it might not come true?
It’s a terrible thing to do to ourselves. How long do you have to tell a story before it somehow, alchemically, comes true? Just because we’ve been wanting it, all of us, for so long? Who knows? This might yet be the year.