31/12/2025
There is a cruelty to New Year’s Eve—a demand that we toast to the passing of time, when time is the very thing that robbed us. How can I celebrate the arrival of a year that promises to be a tomb for everything we once were?
As the clock winds down its final seconds, the air grows thin. I stand on the border of a year that will not hold your name, watching the fireworks burn out like the questions I never asked.
But until then, as crowds of strangers deck the halls and cheer for this damn season, the vessel you created in me will perish as I enter a year where the shrine of your eyes doesn’t exist. For what is a god without its faithful servant?
My heart mimics the thunder of the firecrackers, but in its deepest, most stifled chamber, it only fractures—a quiet, internal breaking as the old year bleeds out.
But if God were to hear my pleas and grant us a chance to relive it—no, I wouldn’t go back to that night to change our fate. Instead, I’d simply choose to experience what we had just once more.
I’d choose to get soaked in that rain with you again, while the winged seraphs of heaven came roaring down upon us as the world fell away beneath our feet. In that fleeting moment, suspended in that earthly scene, I would have asked you those silly little questions.
To walk across that bridge on our way home once more—the water familiar and dark below us, the sky bruised in heavy orange—I should have asked you a thousand things. I should have known you deeper.
“How do you start your day?”
“What did you notice first about me?”
“If I were a worm, would you still love me?”
Silly little questions. But I never took my chance. I never allowed myself to be a little sillier with you.
I could have taken back my choice that night, and we could still be dancing within these walls. But I didn’t. I have made peace with that decision because in every hesitant pause, in every breath I took, every time I gazed at you with pleading eyes—one step forward, three steps back—I was already acting as if you were gone.
Nothing could have changed my mind that night, nor any night that has passed since. I was mourning us while we were still happening.
Until then, the ghosts of your memory will keep knocking upon my door at night. And I will stand there quietly, ears pressed to the wood and hands tied behind my back. I’ll wait still, until your ghost fades away.
So now, when the clock strikes twelve, I’ll simply take a deep breath. My tears won’t fall, and my walls won’t break. I will watch the year slip in—a year where our ill-fated story will remain unwritten and buried.
’Tis the damn season.
Literary by Josefa Nikka Esquivel, The Channel
