No two people wake up exactly the same. We start within ourselves, simple thoughts and muscles under the sheets as we open up wide and yawn into a new day. Time passes this way. We start within ourselves and then move out into the world. Crusty, sticky night is still there at the corners of our mouth and eyes. We carry parts of the day before on our backs, the weeks before, the months before that make us who we are, and when we reach milestones in our burdens we stop and think.
The end of the year is like that. People kneel down in their minds at the altar of change, and pray for some semblance of control over the future. They touch their foreheads to the cold floor and chant for control over change.
We do not have control over change.
If we did have control over change, if I had control over change, I would not be sitting in my brother’s apartment in sunny plastic dirty Hollywood, listening to the answering machine. A law office has called about my mother. This is nothing new, and I assume it is bad, because with my mother it is always bad; she is always hounded to the corners of the earth by incessant pain and trauma. She is forever walking on the razor’s edge of breakdown, and when she slips it is those of us who love her that are cut. Sometimes she calls, drunk in the evening again, to ask about how my day was. I really know this is just a setup. It is a trap to enter the game we play, where everything starts benignly and then descends through all 15 or however many rings of hell there are into a special place where we once again fight like we always do. It always comes back to marriage and divorce, men, race, money, my failures as a son, the world’s failures as a place of happiness for my mother. Even when I’m not talking to her, even when it’s just lawyers calling about business they can’t talk about, just please can we talk to your mother, even then I still hear the conversation I would have with her. It’s always the same conversation whether it’s over the phone, or via email, and it never ends happily.
Some things never change.
“She said you need to work on being more accessible,” my roommate told me, after talking with her friend about why I’m single, “But she’s crazy so don’t worry about it.” Her friend might be crazy but she’s right and I know she is. If I could control change, I would change that. I would take myself to the personality cleaners, where they could hang me on a rack and run chemicals over me, and I could come out the other side in a shiny plastic bag, waiting to be picked up. They could put me in a storefront window and I would sell like the hot Christmas item, out of stock after Thanksgiving.
Since I can’t control change, this is not what happens, and instead I’m waking at 3 am in the middle of the week wondering how nice the night was for other people, or dreaming about that time after graduation when I laid in bed curled up next to a girl and we fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and I spent the whole night exploring her curves like they were petals of a flower that I would never dream of cutting out of the garden. We were both gone in the morning.
Some things never change.
But some things do change, and that is what the New Year represents to me. When I’m sitting or standing wherever I’m sitting or standing when the ball drops, it will be a chance, like every day is a chance: to be happy, or sad; to step forward, or back, and I will continue always searching searching searching. I will search for myself out among the sea of people, I will search for ways to seize change and guide it under my hand like Caesar with an army, so that perhaps when the time comes again next year, I can stare back at the magnificent catastrophe behind me and smile, a little freer from want.
