Back when I wrote real-life stories instead of superheroes and fantasy, I used to tell a lot of stories around holidays. Christmas, as I've mentioned, is my favorite - I get both melancholy and excited for it every year - but New Year's is a close second, because it is inherently about renewal, and letting go, and starting fresh. This story is partially true - the characters are fictional but I did in fact used to drive to the beach every New Year's Day morning to watch the sun rise. Then I got old and tired and didn't want to stay up all night anymore, and I got so very tired of the cold. But this is one of my favorite unpublished stories, so I wanted to share it here. I hope you like it. Resolution (A New Year's Story)The first glass of whiskey soured in my stomach, my body immediately and inexplicably repulsed by it by the third sip. It's funny how you can be a lifelong drinker, how you can stay loyal to your particular poison for years on end, and how that poison can still sometimes turn on you, can tell you, no son, not tonight, you and I will be parting company for the evening, and leave you, sober and cold, to face the world alone.
I dumped the ice and remnants of golden liquor in the sink and poured some tonic water into a new glass, over ice, with a lime. It wouldn't have the same benefits as whiskey, but at least no one would ask why I was choosing not to drink on New Year's Eve. The house was set off the beaten path in a small, upscale neighborhood of a small, upscale suburb twenty or twenty five miles north of Boston; it was the old family homestead of an old friend whose parents had passed young, and whose siblings had decided, in their honor, to maintain this house, despite having moved away, to the city or to the country or anywhere else but this moneyed little town, as a place to gather, as a place they could share and call home. It sat on the edge of a pond, now mostly frozen, black and gleaming and visible from the back porch. I pulled on my long, black wool coat and stepped outside. It was raining; I remembered New Year’s Eves as a teenager, going into the city, temperatures bitterly cold, winds biting as we crossed footbridges over Storrow Drive, arguing about where to go, who would take our fake IDs, who would not check for them at all, whether we should just give up and find a warm place to hole up and hide. If there was a reason to believe in global warming it was nights like this one, were cold rain coughed and spat down on us, melting the Christmas snow as the year came to an end. I turned my back on the pond and looked in through the sliding glass doors at the party within. I knew most of the guests, some well, some marginally, a few intimately, in those ways adults, when looking for something to do and someone to wake up with on a given day, know each other intimately and fleetingly. I had a few old friends here--the host, and Bethany, recently returned from six months' business in northern California with a taste for Napa reds and the kind of tan you can only get on the west coast, a few others. But mostly it was a gathering of names and faces I had known a year or less, people I had just begun learning about, people I knew I might not know still, in a year. I found myself making bets in my own head, wondering who would still sail in the same waters as I did in twelve or eighteen months. I started, perhaps crassly or rudely, giving them titles and nicknames as I watched them sip their drinks and wait for the year to end. The Marathoner, she of the kindest demeanor and sharp wit; the Scientist, one of my new drinking buddies, who liked to take stabs at combining his research with conspiracy theories; the Cub Reporter, young, idealistic, who had for a short time reminded me what it was like to chase after a dream with rabid intensity; the Failed Writer, brilliant and unmotivated, with her cocaine habit currently in check but teetering on the verge of addiction. The Once Dancer, now moved on to other dreams, like becoming a playwright and marrying a rich husband. The Would Be Rock Star, who was clinging onto his dream, one I once shared but gave up long ago, who reminded us all that while music might be a young man's sport, it's an old man's war to win. Bethany stepped onto the porch, pulling the sliding door closed behind her and a pack of Parliaments from her purse. "Why in God's name are you drinking tonic water?" "It's gin and tonic." "Bullshit, you hate gin. You picked an odd night to become a teetotaler, Jason." I shrugged. "What are you doing up here?" she asked. "Wondering how many of those people in there will still be in my life in a year," I said. Bethany took a sip of her wine and moved next to me, to look inside, following my gaze. "You ever think maybe you're the tourist?" "What's that?" "You're the tourist. We don't disappear on you, babe, you disappear on us." She smirked, carefully holding wine and cigarette in one hand while she moved to fix her unruly cloud of wine-red hair, pushing it out of her face. "I'm speaking from personal experience, you know. You drop off the radar very easily." "That's because I'm a spy, you know." She laughed. "Is that the excuse this year? It's because you're driftwood. You just pass on by, most of the time. Except for the unlucky few, like me, for whom you keep turning up like the proverbial bad penny. Every time I think you're, you know, overseas in the Peace Corps or dead in a ditch somewhere or doing time in a Mexican prison, you show up at a holiday party." It was my turn to shrug. The rain was coming down harder now, some old and angry storm system growing furious at its own inability to freeze over and drop snow. I looked at my watch. "Ten til." "I used to love New Year's Eve," she said. "I swear I used to think you could feel the whole world changing beneath your feet on nights like tonight." "And now?" "And now it's just a reason to think you're getting older and realize it's harder to find someone to plant one on you at midnight whom you do not find repulsive." "Hey," I said. "I'm not kissing you at midnight. I know where you've been." "That is not what I was going to suggest," I said. "But I've got an idea." "Does this idea involve kissing at all?" "No." "Okay then, I'll listen." "I'll explain after midnight," I said. "It looks like they're waiting for us inside." *** Someone turned on the television, where a mummy in a suit was MCing the dropping of the ball in Times Square. I'd been to Times Square on New Year’s; virtually every New Year’s Eve event is overrated, and it is just a matter of scale as to how overrated it is in comparison to any normal night, and Times Square is the most overrated of all, just based on sheer numbers and hype. At midnight people cheered, people kissed, new lovers and old friends, chaste and full of lust, in with the new, in with the old, out with whatever you happened to be tired of at the time. Me, I just threw back the rest of my drink as though it were more than quinine and water and watched. Some time between one and two in the morning, Bethany found me again and asked about my plan. I explained it to her. "You're out of your mind," she said. "Why?" "Because it is cold, it is raining, and there are more drunks on the road here than an Octoberfest road race." "Trust me. It's always worked in the past." As the party wound down we gathered our coats and headed to my car. We drove to my apartment, a half-hour away due east; we drove in silence, watching police cruisers prowl like sharks in dark water for drunks on the road, peering into passing vehicles filled with men in disheveled suits and women in silly silver hats, looking boozy and tired and sad. Somewhere along a minor highway we saw a small foreign car embedded in the divider, surrounded by cops, the passengers downtrodden and wet and horrified, but unhurt. "Amateur night," Bethany said, the only time she broke the silence of the drive. Otherwise, it was just our breathing, the sound of the wheels whispering against blacktop, the rhythmic pattern of wiper blades against glass. At my apartment I brewed a pot of coffee and found Bethany warmer clothes. We found a pair of hiking boots an ex-girlfriend had left behind that were just a size too big, which she used to replace her heels. I ditched my suit for a pair of jeans and a heavy hooded sweatshirt. Wool hats for both of us, my heavy mittens for her, a pair of wicking gloves for myself, long, mismatched scarves, a waterproof yellow coat for her in place of the expensive winter duster she had worn to the party. We filled a thermos with coffee and dug out a pair of travel mugs from the recesses of my kitchen. "Think this is overkill?" she said. I shook my head. "You like the cold even less than I do. It's not overkill." And, an hour before dawn, we were back on the road, headed for the sea. *** The road to the shore was empty and dead at five-thirty in the morning. The rain had stopped, and temperatures never fell below freezing; everything was coated with a wet gleam, freshly washed. I picked the beach because I knew they did not bar their parking lot during the winter, for locals to run their dogs on the shore. I knew also that the lot was just a short walk up over a hill to the shore. January is a terrible time to go walking down dark paths to the ocean. I pulled the car right up to the sand, near one of the pathways. We got out, pulling our hats down low--Bethany wrapped her scarf across her face, leaving just her eyes visible--and we got out, carrying out coffee. "You're making this up as you go along, aren't you," she said. "Nah," I said. "I used to do this every year, when I was a kid." "A kid?" "Relatively speaking. As a teenager. In college too, before I started going to bars and driving to the shore became a legal liability." "Always this beach?" "Whatever beach I was closest to, really. As long as it faced east and wasn't locked down for the winter." Once upon a time, I decided, when I was young and romantic, to watch the sunrise on New Year's Day from the shore. I wanted the illusion of being the first person to see the sun hit this particular part of our world. I knew there were folks halfway around the world already well into the new year, living in the future, nursing their hangovers and starting their days. But that was their world, and this was mine, and I wanted to be here to greet the sun. Funny, the romantic tomfoolery we engage in when we're young. You go a few times, you battle the cold, when you're too poor to have a good car with good heat, when you're too stupid to remember to bring warm clothes and hot coffee, when you think the universe revolves around you, and when the year begins when you wake, and when you say hello to the sun. Eventually you grow up, you move on, you celebrate the night and find someone to take you home or to take home with you, and you wake, in your bed or in someone else's, long after the day has begun, and you start the slow and creaking machineries of your body, shaking off the snows of a dead year to begin again. There's no time for little romantic notions like watching the sun rise when there is whiskey to be drunk and arms to be wrapped up in, when there is sleep to be had in a warm bed, far from the crashing waves of a black, bitter ocean. Instead I just tell Bethany about the first time I came here--here being the shore, here being the beginning, not necessarily this beach, this place, this lifetime--the morning after the last time I ever worked with a particular rock band, singing cover songs and trying to win back some pretty girl who, at that particular moment in history, ruled my heart. She and I had gone to a stone tower in a small forest outside of Boston that night at midnight to watch the fireworks from afar, stupidly wandering into the cold night, trespassing after dark; and later we went to the shore, and watched the sun rise. It had been brutally cold that year and snow covered the beach, snow so old and hardened by the cold it had the texture of cheap Styrofoam, turning to frozen dust beneath your boots. This year though, the rain was winning, and the snow was short on the ground, patches of white and beige like dying clouds against the black-brown wet sand. The sky was hazy and just starting to turn silvery white on the horizon. "We're unlucky," I said. "On a good year, it's all pink and gold. I don't think we're getting a show this year." Bethany was silent a moment. I looked down at her, taking in the waves with her large, gunmetal gray eyes, peering over a ridiculous mask of red and black flannel scarf. "The last time I did this, I went alone," I said. "I think I was twenty. There was a man running his black Labrador retriever down the shore. I think he figured out what I was doing. Just sort of tipped his cap and wandered off, further down the beach." Finally, she spoke. "You are a ridiculous man, you know," she said, finally, her voice muffled by the scarf. "I'm well aware." "Although if I'm reading you correctly, you were an even more ridiculous boy." "Also accurate." She pulled down her scarf and sipped at her coffee. The sun rose further, and we could see it struggle against the cloud cover; in places where the haze was lighter, shards of red and pink started to break through. Otherwise, it was a concussive white, a creeping hope against the remaining darkness. A year of black and white and gray, with little by way of indigo and gold to show for it. They say what you're doing at midnight dictates what happens with the rest of your year, but I used to think, and sometimes I think I still do, that it is not what we do in those moments when an archaic calendar turns over that really matters, but simply what the world looks like when it opens its eyes the next morning. Hello there, Year. We've been expecting you. Your predecessor was unkind, and we were hoping, perhaps, you might right a few wrongs for us. But if not, well, there's always the next guy. We stayed a bit longer, until the coffee had grown lukewarm, and we had grown too cold, and eventually, we turned out back on the sun and stomped our way back to the car. Bethany was quiet most of the ride home. As we pulled into a diner off Route 1, she spoke. "I don't think I could do that every year," she said. "It takes a lot of energy," I said. "It's hard to be motivated to stay awake, to stay warm, to get back on the road." "That's not why I don't think I could do it," she said. "I'm not sure why. I just don't know if I could." She paused. "Have you ever watched the last sunset instead?" she said. "No," I said. "I'm better at hello than goodbye." "I thought you might say that," she said. And eventually, well-fed and overtired, we drove home, following the sun west, into another year, and all that goes with it.
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About the authorMatthew Phillion is the author of the Indestructibles YA novel series, its spinoff Echo and the Sea, and the Dungeon Crawlers series of RPG-style novellas. Archives
November 2023
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