001 — New Years Day

“I wonder when the first time we will not spend a new years eve together will be,” Cyril says.

It is the first meal of the year: “brunch” at 4pm right in the nick of time before the kitchen closes and the winter sky is already starting to darken. Tiramisu and hazelnut cheesecake and elderflower champagne and omelets.

“Probably when I have a boyfriend,” David says.

We joke, as we do.

“He won’t be with us?”

“No, he’ll probably go to his party.”

“Yeah, it’ll be on a yacht or something. He’ll be rich.”

2017 in gold balloons floating against a red brick wall. Twinkle lights and mini spotlights and dangling tchotchkes. Low chatter and clinking plates and music that I either already have or would have added to a personal “feels” playlist.

We reflect on the year, gossip about people, make fun of our friends and each other in good humor. We are surprised, perhaps pretentiously so, at how incompetent people in the “real world” seem to be — this is our big real-world revelation of the past year. How do these adults who get to be our “bosses” get to where they are? How did they become “successful”?

But then again, wasn’t it like this in school too? Is it really a big revelation?

We make our own plans for this upcoming year, how we will move towards our dreams.

David will upload one music thing a day to his Instagram.

“That sounds like a lot to commit to, maybe you should try just doing it for a month.”

No, it will be easy he says. He has thousands of files in his computer that he will be able to upload. It wouldn’t be creating something new every single day.

I have ambitions of writing a sketch every day as I did for a few months, one semester in college, but I already know I will fail because I am sitting here at brunch, tired from all the champagne the night before, and my joints are throbbing, and I definitely won’t want to write when I get home, I will want to lie around on the couch under the fuzzy blanket listening to Cyril play random cover songs on the piano, until we decide we should eat the leftover frozen truffle fries and watch the Sense8 Christmas special episode with Jordana and then we will want to just go to bed and do the crossword and then cuddle and talk for hours instead of sleeping at a normal human hour which will then make me too lazy to write the next day too and I won’t have the heart to do anything “productive,” really, until the day after he leaves and I must re-adjust to being alone again, but for now, I say this is something I want to try to accomplish, already thinking about the ways in which I can adjust the goal to be a weekly one, something consistent and productive without being unrealistically ambitious, that will still make room for days in which I will simply want to wile away the hours, how to have my cake and eat it too. I’m always juggling nowadays. Maybe it will never feel balanced.

“You should compose, why don’t you compose?” David asks.

“Yeah, I really should…” Cyril says.

They discuss different music composition programs and workflows, and I stare out the window at the glowing, golden Christmas lights wrapped around the trees in front of the cafe.

A full, golden heart. Warm contentment. Deep familiarity and friendship. How safe and stable this feels.

How safe and stable it always feels, every time I’ve felt it, with different faces and different dreams and different spaces. How it always feels like this is it. This is forever. We will still be laughing and talking exactly like this, with this warmth, when we are 40 years old with children and our lives will be more whole and we will have all achieved our dreams and have the privilege of being able to laugh at ourselves when we recall this first meal of 2017. How certain it always feels that this will be true.

And yet, “I wonder when the first time we will not spend a new years eve together will be.”