new year’s eve, 2023.
i order dumplings for delivery because my parents are at a resort. i trust that they will think the wine has evaporated because it’s a common enough occurrence around here. i stumble around my room. it’s late, i think i’m watching television, i couldn’t tell you. the delivery takes an hour, gets stolen. i recapitulate this story for instagram, then spend two hours angling for a refund. i hesitate, then write a long and vacuous text about how i wish someone who isn’t talking to me would start doing that again, saying i don’t understand even though i’m pretty sure i do, and at some point in the evening i start slurring things i shouldn’t say into the mouth of my home phone.
at 12:01, my boyfriend calls.
he says he will be in town for next new year’s, he’ll make sure of it. he says, what are you up to, i miss you, i love you. he says happy new year, and i nod, looking at the door.
he might be in town this year, i wouldn’t know. these days he’s more of a punchline, a bad memory, fog passing in the night—not a ship, i’m sorry to say. it’s new year’s eve, it’s 2024, and the only thing i could think of to do was write while sad-eyed lady of the lowlands loops on my laptop. the only thing i could think of to do was write, not about something interesting or clever or even beautiful, but another edifice in the ever-growing graveyard of my self-mythology, another attempt at metastasizing grief into work you might want to read about.
is it working?
are you here?
are you entertained?
i am trying to focus on what i am and not who is looking at me. i don’t know why i find it so difficult; i assume it’s because when you offer pieces like this to the internet at large you take for granted that anyone could be reading it. secretly i would like to be more articulate, more intelligent, more elegant than anyone who has wronged me. i want them to read it and weep, i want them to regret, i want them to laugh, as long as it means they are looking.
my favourite concept in physics is the observer effect. in layman’s terms, this refers to the idea that the act of “observing” a quantum system will change the outcome of your experiment. i find this intensely romantic, important, inherent to the theory of human relationships. when we look at each other, i say, gesturing wildly, we change something about the outcome of the other person’s life. and it’s true, i think, but particles don’t need to be understood. the mechanisms of the universe would progress without us cataloguing them, we look at them because we want something out of them. which is true of looking at people, only people need to be understood.
it matters, you know? i have to think something about this matters because i have no other way to make sense of what happens to me. i have to arrange life into narrative, metaphor, give the onslaught of inscrutable and often unbearable events boundaries. the cotton thread around people and form waxes, it wanes, this year it broke and it was a hell of a time getting everyone back where they were supposed to be again.
if this reads melancholic, trust me, there’s no other language i can drape this year in to make it sound acceptable. i have other words, harsher words, but none that are still worth saying.
a liminal space is transitional, transformative. it’s usually an airport. a liminal space is the fastest i can go on the treadmill, time slowing to molasses during an analysis exam, staring a boy down like the barrel of a gun. liminal spaces are crying in the park and resting my head against the bus window drunk and yes, sitting in the airport, crossing my fingers, wishing on planes.
in short, if anywhere has ever been a liminal space, it was this year.
new year’s eve, 2024.
finally learned how to do my eyeliner. got through some of the hardest first year courses my university offers and came back for round 2, guns swinging. saw taylor swift across the ocean. broke up with three people, sometimes more than once. listened to so much music that the bars for years past barely register. got my first job. went through the longest depressive episode of my life, then shifted the pane of frosted glass so i could see the world again.
the world, by the way, is a place i am intensely in love with.
basically, i’m sitting in my room watching the minutes tick away to midnight and messaging my friends. i was meant to go downtown and skate, waylaid by the curse of chronic pain, but i don’t feel lonely. which is odd, because i spent so much of this year feeling so lonely i wanted to crawl out of my skin, but i don’t feel lonely. show me my heart taken out of my body and i’ll show you all the places the arteries still connect.
i have, i think, a lot left to say. i’m not going anywhere yet. (nice try.)
on the tail end of this particular instalment in my emotional memoirs, i might as well note down a few things i intend to do in 2025. as your local aspiring number theorist, i feel honour-bound to let you know that this year is 452. everything is a sign if you’d like it to be.
so, a few things i want to get done in 2025:
in the spirit of numbers, i’m setting my reading goal to 66 books (to reach 1000 books read) and my watching goal to 31 (to reach 500 films watched)
write 30k words for the fiction i am working on at present
continue to write and submit poetry for publication
just one semester at this university, i would like my gpa to be grad school worthy1
reject shame.
be open with people.
stop running.2
and i think ideally i would start performing stand-up, but it might be best to see whether i can knock the gpa goal out of the park first.
as a final note, i’d like to express my genuine thanks for anyone who’s reading. i started writing nowhaunting again at my nadir, and cataloguing what i was going through in obfuscated fiction and metaphor-ridden diary entries was an important method of clawing out. i hope to have better things to tell you next year, more frequently, more tidily, with the cotton thread pulled taut around what i know exists.
all my love, and a wonderful 2025,
arden.
what counts as “grad school worthy” is left as an exercise to me on december 31st, 2025.
on a metaphorical level. on a physical one the gym is a very useful habit to keep up.
thank you from a friend who stumbled upon this in her inbox at a critical moment 🧡 never stop writing and sharing 🧡
i'm an arden-t fan of your writing. it forever inspires me