Happy new year!
Christmas was filled with feasts and gluts: tables groaning under enormous spreads, my mind creaking with the unwilling weight of new realisations, new ideas, new ways to make my life better. A pagan festival of lights and hyggelig, if I may mix my erroneous cultural references, seasoned with a light sprinkling of Painful, Brutal Truths.
And there were friends I hadn’t seen for years, or who had never been to this (no longer) new home, or who I had missed for huge swathes of their lives. And it was magical. All these people! Whom I loved! And who made me laugh so much! And knew me so well! To have a friend at our table who had kicked around with me as young teens, planning our lives with perfect self-importance, as now we sat discussing job plans and home decoration because, shit, man, we love that now. But still also discussing our families, because no one ever outgrows that. Or the entire clan of ex-colleagues, like a bank of blown-out wild roses, dancing and drunken at a wedding, two of whom bundle me out of the back door after the bride and groom have left like I’m Taylor S heading for her blacked-out SUV. Lunch dates and dinner dates and coffees and staying up late playing Mario with old friends and only having little, ever so little twinges about the final moments with my father that I’m not sure will ever stop creeping up on me when I least want them, but then the children, reading to each other, knocking over the rack of drying clothes to build a giant den, starting every sentence when they play among themselves with this moment’s request to Pretend…
For maybe the first January in my life, I’ve taken some New Year’s advice and have made no resolutions. I’m looking forward to events, and people, and possibilities. But I’m making no promises. And it feels good.