Matter Anti-Matter

I celebrated New Year’s Eve with my boyfriend by calling a restaurant at 5pm, making a reservation for 9pm, and then deciding last-minute to go see a movie before dinner. 

We made it to the movie theater five minutes before the movie was supposed to start, and not surprisingly it was sold out. So we wandered around Union Square and held hands and joked about walking to Times Square just to see what it was like. Street vendors blew their noisemakers trying to lure you into buying crazy 2012-themed hats and accessories. Part of me wanted to buy something and get in the spirit of things but then I started thinking about how long everything had been sitting out on the street and bed bugs and tourists touching things and well, it just didn’t seem worth it. 

We headed back into Brooklyn, and went to what ended up being an epic three-hour long dinner. All night we’d been talking about expectations and how NYE is such a thing and people want you to do certain things. I sent obligatory texts to a few friends asking what their plans were, knowing full well that I had no intention of joining them. One was heading to a party at her boyfriend’s friend’s girlfriend’s place. Another was going to dinner with friends of his boyfriend followed by fireworks at Grand Army Plaza. Secretly I hoped someone would say “I’m going to play Settlers of Catan in your living room and then watch reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation until 4am.” But nobody did. Nobody ever does. 

A three-hour dinner is a damn long time, and during it we talked about everything, about our jobs, our childhoods, the families we just spent two weeks visiting, how much things have changed and how things really haven’t changed at all. Somehow we ended up talking about my parents and the things they did right and things they didn’t do right. They pushed me to excel and work hard and value achievement above all else. They had me so focused on being the best at everything growing up that my motivation was reduced to pleasing them so that they’d leave me alone. 

I graduated as valedictorian of my high school and felt absolutely nothing. No sense of achievement. Only a deep resentment that I had to give a speech in front of hundreds of people I hated for having normal high school lives and friends and people to share experiences with. 

The original draft of my speech was all about how High School doesn’t matter and everything They told us was important wasn’t important at all. I remember spitefully turning in a copy to Sister Anthony who gave it back to me and told me I wasn’t allowed to give the speech I’d written. She and my English teacher provided “suggestions” for things I should say resulting in a very sanitized, boring piece of crap about looking ahead and following your dreams. 

On graduation day, I stood up on that podium and delivered MY speech instead of theirs. Everyone loved it, and I finally felt like some part of me had something in common with all these people. They hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me out of the auditorium in victory.

But that’s not what happened. I was 16 and living in absolute terror of what my parents might think if I defied school authorities in front of them, how disappointed they would be in me. So I read the other speech. I recited lines about how four years at Boylan Catholic High School had shaped us into young adults ready to achieve great things. How we represented a bright future full of possibilities. 

Afterwards I hid in the bathroom and cried, ashamed of myself for letting Them win. I had achieved nothing.

Now I’m sitting in a booth at a Japanese restaurant on New Year’s Eve, going through the motions of reflecting on the past because you’re supposed to reflect on the past. I thought about how I packed up my life and moved to New York City to try and finally accomplish something. How I used to commute four hours from Brooklyn to Staten Island so I could teach writing on a campus that used to be the State Mental Institution. And how when I’d finally get home late at night, I felt certain that I’d failed miserably again. 

When I paused to look back on it all, I realized just how much things have changed and how deeply I’ve needed to feel like I genuinely accomplished something. And this year, I finally felt like I had. 

My plan had been to ring in the New Year at home after dinner, but at 11:45pm we were just getting to the dessert course, and by golly I was going to see this meal to the very end. At the stroke of midnight, we sipped champagne and checked into foursquare to see if there was some sort of New Year’s badge (there wasn’t). 

Twenty minutes later we were back at home watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix into the wee hours of the night. It was exactly what I wanted to do.