December 31st, 2025 (8:30 PM)
I remember crying alone in my dark room while my parents, my younger sister, her friends, and their parents were in the living room, happily celebrating New Year’s Eve. As pathetic as I felt crying in such a dramatic and cliché circumstance, I was grieving becoming one step further away from my childhood and one step closer to the age I thought I wanted to be, but now do not like a wish granted without reading the fine print. The loneliness was like no other. It did not help that I had just finished a fantastic book (The Myth of Sisyphus) that had fundamentally changed me—a farewell of the heart, like letting go of a best friend, knowing it would never be the same again.
Today, on yet another New Year’s Eve, I finished a visit with an old friend I return to often (Letters to a Young Poet) and found myself tearing up again, on my third read, in the middle of a subway ride into the city. Surprisingly, this sense of solitude felt… good like a spice that makes you tear up but still want another bite. Now I sit alone at a wine bar—because, again, I am the only one on time—and I am enjoying this solitude, watching everyone else enjoy their night: talking to friends, throwing their drinks and their heads back with joy. Although my vanity doesn’t like how I look on the outside tonight, I feel really grown on the inside. Mature. As if I am finally experiencing the transition from girl to woman as I imagined it as a child.
So, as yet another year passes, and as I turn 27 this February, I wonder if this feeling—of becoming closer to the vision of myself I had as a child—is, ironically, also a way of moving further away from her.