Untitled--Serina

I had always dreaded New Year’s Eve. I always envisioned myself sipping on glamorous cocktails while overlooking the Manhattan skyline in the few minutes before midnight, filled with pride and excitement. It was obviously not a feasible fantasy because:

1. I am only 17 years old.
   
2. I live here, not New York.
   

and
3. The year was never enough.

It was before, though. I had no concept of accomplishment or time as a little girl. So, New Year’s Eve was simply the day of another family gathering where we frolicked around wearing gold paper hats and blowing on cheap party horns. It was enough for me. What I did in the year did not matter and everything else was secondary to my then-present joy. New Year’s Eve did not matter, so I never felt disappointment or regret. As I grew older and the list of responsibilities and plans became longer, I found that New Year’s Eve did matter though. Whatever I felt in the last hour of the year- emptiness, fear, or happiness- was what defined it. Or at least I thought so.

By the time I was 12 years old, I had built up my first bunch of achievements and failures in the year. I gained a best friend. I lost all ties with a family member. I went on an airplane for the first time. It was the year I began to realize both the order and chaos that the rest of my life would bring, both the joys and injustices. Each year since then was always marked by some scarlet letter, some loss or failure that overshadowed all of the other small successes. Sometimes it was a literal letter, like getting a B+ in my honors biology class. Sometimes it was neglecting and losing a friend. I learned to end each year with indifference and blindly hope for better in the next.

2019 was entirely different; it was the year that I dreaded the most. Not only was it the last of the decade, but it was the year I applied to colleges, started my senior year, and virtually planned out the rest of my life. It was the year I felt the most confined but also the most free.

In 2019, I traveled to another continent alone and spoke to people I didn’t know in a foreign tongue. While I was reluctant to talk to strangers before, I found myself waving to people along the Seine and making friends in the crowds of the Louvre. I walked the narrow cobblestone streets with a joie de vivre I never found at home, a zest that somehow never left. It was of course a clich​é- the whole “travel changed me” narrative- but it didn’t matter. People left while places came and I knew that I was destined to go along too.

So, when 2019 New Year’s Eve came along on Tuesday night I was no longer indifferent, no longer desolate. I sat around the living room with my family and donned a gold paper “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” hat and 2020 cutout glasses while blowing on a party horn. I watched the ball drop on the TV and felt my fears, my old routines of the past years drop with it. This year, it was enough. I would move to Paris in 2020 and find home again. The scarlet letters would fade and I knew that the next year would be enough, too.