I fell asleep around 11:30am on December 31, 2008 and woke up at 12:40 am January 1, 2009. I nudged the Russian lover beside me: "Happy New Year, Happy Birthday. I love you." And then I fell back to sleep.
It was a good way to ring in the new year. In my life, there have been years where I felt like I wanted to be awake at midnight, surrounded with people and sound, drunk on cheap champagne and excitement. Those years were few, and the years where that actually happened were fewer. I spent my lonely teenage years longing to feel the buzz of a crowd, the cheer of a party, the warmth of friends or lovers - anything on New Year's Eve except the feeling of being an outsider, an observer, the one watching others experiencing fun and happiness while wondering what it must be like.
I'm old enough now that I no longer feel like the one on the wrong side of the fence of high school cliques. And while I have the choice to spend the New Year's eve any way I want, I've found that I enjoy a simple, gentle evening. I am perfectly happy to sit at home on the couch near the Christmas tree, slowly sipping on a glass of wine.
The years seem to get harder as they go by, feel heavier as they approach. Maybe that's simply what is means to grow up, grow old. And we deal with the time's relentless passage in our own ways, whether that means screaming at it drunkenly or accepting it quietly.
Although I do appreciate that New Year's Eve is my one legitimate opportunity to wear sequins -- awesome gaudy sequins in abundence. Unless you can make it to Mardi Gras, Halloween and New Year's Eve are a girl's two annual opportunities to get away with throwing out the social dress code of good taste and reasonable modesty and outfit herself like an unabashed classless whore. And there is a little bit of a classless whore in all of us.