Seven New Years

Saratoga Springs, NY 2008/2009
It was New Year’s Eve and for the first time in five years, I was truly single--not the promise of a relationship taking shape, not entrenched in a four-year relationship with the woman I used to think I was going to marry. I left her in no small part because I met someone else, and even though that someone else didn’t work out, the experience crystallized that the relationship probably wasn’t right for me in the first place.

It was the second consecutive year I spent New Year’s in Saratoga Springs, where I used to work summers. Removed from the summer sun, it’s an Upstate New York city, complete with blustery cold and enough snow that we almost canceled the trip.

It was me and Scalise. Both single, both with vague ambitions of finding girls to flirt with, and both too conservative and rationally minded to expect anything to come out of it.

In the most memorable moment I made eye contact with an annoying bouncer, who'd been giving us a hard time since we set foot in the dive bar, first for setting our drinks on the edge of the pool table, then for holding our drinks and letting the condensation drip over the felt. We were close to the door and had decided to leave. There were plenty of bodies between us and this bouncer and so it’s not quite so much of a bad-ass gesture as a juvenile prank I knew I wouldn’t face any consequences for when I raised my eyebrows at him and turned what’s left of my bottle of beer upside down into a corner pocket of that precious billiards table, and we headed out to the street.

Out on the street, my breath took shape in clouds and I thought that New Year’s ought to be more than this. That how you spend that last night and first morning of a year ought to be more electric and more fun, not to mention that it ought to say more about who I was. These are all theoretical suppositions--the most fun I’d had at New Year’s at that point are spending the night with my sister and grandmother playing board games when I was much younger, or the years when Scalise and I pigged out on junk food and watched movies in his room.

There had to be more.

Las Vegas, NV 2010/2011
We actualized our New Year’s ambitions. For the first time, I was not in Upstate New York on New Year’s Eve, but out on the glowing neon strip in Las Vegas.

I was miserable.

The idea of Vegas vacation for New Year’s seemed to represent limitless potential. Adventure. Escapades. Drinking and dancing in the street, because it’s all not only legal, but to be expected in this city.

But this trip became a cautionary tale. The northeast winter got my first flight canceled, and forced the choice between re-booking at an exorbitant rate or letting the vacation go. Had I known that I would fall ill the next morning, I probably would have let the trip go.

Plans made, money invested, I flew across the country far sicker than I should have. Out on the Strip, I waited for midnight to hit not to celebrate, but because then we could justify going back to our hotel, where I could sleep.

Las Vegas, NV 2011/2012
This was a do-over. A chance to get Vegas at New Year’s right, and a different trip altogether because we’re joined by our girlfriends. Our relationships were both still new a year earlier. They were more solid now in a sense--Scalise, with the woman he would end up marrying. My girlfriend at the time--I had my doubts.

But we went out for dinners and drinks. We road tripped to and from the Grand Canyon in a day. And when the clock struck twelve to give way to a new year, we were out on the Strip.

I wasn’t sick this time, but still subject to the sensation that there ought to be more than this.

Baltimore, MD 2012/2013
When the year turned over from 1998 to 1999, I hung out alone at home, watching my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on VHS tapes I’d recorded from TV. It was a time when watching boundless television felt like a special treat, and I had a good enough time of it, but left that night thinking I probably ought to spend the holiday with other people from then on.

I finished 2012 single. I’d broken up with the girlfriend of two years back at the end of summer, and had gone on to a high-school-style crush on a woman who wasn’t interested, whom I’d go on to pine after for the months to follow.

I took in this new year alone. For the first time since I had moved to Baltimore at the very end of 2007, I didn’t travel out of state or make any big plans. I watched the night’s episode of Monday Night Raw while building a new Target bookcase for my living room. Around eleven, I poured whiskey into a travel mug and headed outside.

Hampden, my neighborhood, had its own simple celebration of the holiday on 34th Street, still full of houses lit for the holidays (the residents of 34th Street take their residence as a mandate for Christmas cheer and assemble an impressive display). There were crowds and there was a ball dropped. I took all of this in, and remember thinking 2013 would have to be better than 2012.

New Orleans, LA 2013/2014
I tentatively made the decision to leave my job in Baltimore and pursue a Master of the Fine Arts in creative writing after an inspiring trip to visit a friend doing her MFA in 2010. In 2013, things crystallized as I lined up a mentor to guide me through the process, took the GRE, and established the foundation to actually apply.

Things shifted when I got together with Heather, at the end of summer 2013. My vision shifted from leaving everything and everyone behind to start a new life on my own to building a life with Heather--a still new relationship, transported to a new locale.

Nothing was for certain yet, as I’d only started to send in applications at the end of 2013. But things with Heather grew more sure-footed. We were long distance, but had made a habit of Skype dates, and had good visits in Baltimore and San Diego.

That brings us to New Orleans.

In a throwaway Skype conversation, Heather floated the idea of going down to the Big Easy, where I’d never been, and she’d most recently gone with an ex in a trip that took a turn for the worse. What started as a hypothetical quickly transformed into a concrete plan. The both of us would later claim we were, at best, half serious, before the other did some egging on, research, and booking.

In New Orleans, I feasted on local delicacies--gumbo, jambalaya, Beignets. We drank hurricanes. We took in the new year outdoors on Bourbon Street, before finishing the night with a stop at a dive with a sign claiming to have the best hamburgers in the world--a claim I was too willing to believe, drunk at two in the morning.

The burger wass OK.

I was happy.

San Diego, CA 2014/2015
Heather and I lived in Oregon, and the end of the year was a whirlwind. At the semester break, we flew across the country to tour Upstate New York, where she met my mom, my dad, my sister and brother in law, and series of my closest friends, some of whom I hadn’t even been able to meet up with myself in close to a decade.

Then we flew to San Diego for New Year’s.

Across this trip, I’d had the ring in my bag. The New York leg of the trip felt like preparation, sort of a greatest hits tour of showing her the people and places I’m from. When we got back to California, there was some sense of symmetry. For San Diego is where we had our first date, and the west coast at large is where we started our life together in earnest.

At the approximate spot where we had our first kiss, I got down on one knee to propose.

The rest of the trip had its ups and downs in an unexpectedly long trip to Tijuana, in a night out for New Year’s Eve itself spent with friends of friends, and a shared impulse that we might have been just as well staying in the hotel and watching Ghost on cable.

Still, this New Year’s carried with it a sense of more momentous change than most, as if a new year may actually promise a new life.

Covington, GA 2017/2018

We were parents.

After a period of trying to become pregnant, after unemployment, after an uncertain year of moving a lot, and after a worry-riddled pregnancy, our son arrived.

Two weeks in and we were exhausted.

It turns out those early days of having a child are full as exactly the worries, stress, and long hours everyone talks about. We were both run ragged for two weeks of not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch.

We spent New Year’s Eve with neighbors Heather knew from work. Our hosts had a son, too, the smiliest five year old I’ve ever met, whom they claimed was an ill-tempered terror his first six months. It’s some reassurance of a happier future. They fed us from a casserole, and offer us another to take home.

That preceding November, Taylor Swift’s new album, Reputation dropped, and while it wasn’t her most popular or critically acclaimed work, I liked it, and particularly liked the last track, “New Year’s Day,” with its “Auld Lang Syne” vibes and refrain of, “I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day.” The lyrics are about a faithful friend and maybe romantic partner--the one who will reliably be there for not just the party, but clean up on the day after.

There was little overlap between Swift’s ethos and our lives as new parents, but that line about bottles rang true as life as a three-person unit took hold, and those waking moments alone consisted of practical matters like loading the washing machine, picking up groceries, or--yes--cleaning up our son’s bottles.

And this was life. Not aspiring to some grand social experience I’d never realize, no one night stand, no flight to Las Vegas (besides when we moved there a year and a half later). It was the start of something not only new, but permanent.

And happy.