Waiting for the End of the Year

I’ve survived, celebrated, or ignored many New Year’s Eves in my life. Mostly ignored. A new year merely meant starting over with a clean unmarked calendar and remembering to use a new number when writing the date. For the rest, it didn’t matter. I dragged my old self into the new year, along with all my old problems and frustrations, griefs and hopes, so that there was nothing intrinsically different from one year to the next.

Last New Year’s Eve, the end of the worst year of my life, I toasted the upcoming new year. That was the first time in my life I ever ushered in a new year with any sort of ceremony, but I thought it was important to put on a good show for myself. I needed the symbolism of looking forward to the future, building hopes and creating dreams, finding reasons to live when I could barely find a reason to get up each day.

And now here I am, three hundred and sixty-five days later, waiting for this year to end. I’m not celebrating the end of this year or toasting the new one. I’m simply waiting.

I mentioned in a couple of previous posts this week how grief snuck up on me again. This year ends the first full calendar year since the death of my life mate/soul mate. I can no longer say, “He died last year.” Our shared life is now more remote than ever. And so I’ve been grieving the end of this year. And the end is almost upon me.

I have no sense of the future tonight. I only feel, deep in my soul, that this is the end of something. I’ll be staying up until midnight, holding on to this year as long as possible. And then? I don’t know. The end of something, if only a year, should presage the beginning of something else, shouldn’t it? But I have no plans. No plans to make plans. No plans to plan to make plans. I’m not being negative, I simply have no sense of the future, of what that future might bring.

Right now, tonight, I only feel that this year is ending, and I need to see this year to its very end.