I told myself this year I’d write it straight, sober sentences lined up like candles on the mantle. But the eggnog was already breathing when I poured it, thick and sweet and insisting on memory. Cigarette smoke curled like my handwriting, which I never learned to read. The year sat across from me, legs crossed, smiling the way men do when they know they’re leaving.
It began with resolve. It always does. January has that false-clean smell, like a president’s inaugural speech—hopeful, practiced, already forgetting who paid for the words. I watched him on television, then, with his hand raised and an oath taken, and I remember thinking: We are both pretending to be in control. He had a nation. I had a kitchen table and a cracked mug. Same theater, different audience.
The men this year moved in chapters I didn’t consent to. One of them—an ex, a shadow, a man who knows my address better than my birthday—kept reappearing like a typo the editor refuses to fix. Stalking is such a polite word. Makes it sound botanical. He watched, he waited, he knew. He said he was worried. They always say that. Concern is the most flattering disguise for control. I told myself I was strong. I told myself I was free. I blocked numbers and unblocked memories.
Eggnog refill. Cigarette ash like snowfall. The room is warmer now, or maybe I am.
Somewhere in the middle of the year, the president spoke again—war this time, or money, or unity, it’s all the same vowel sound after a while—and I laughed out loud, alone, because he sounded like every man who ever promised me permanence. We will get through this together. We will rebuild. We will—
Who are we?
The ex texted at 2:14 a.m. in July. Or August. Time melts when you stop respecting it. He said he dreamed of me. I said nothing. Silence is the only border I’ve ever successfully defended.
Another cigarette. The smoke tastes like confession now.
There is someone new. I wasn’t going to write that yet. But the nog is louder than my better judgment. He smells like garlic, heat, and hard work. Restaurant work. The kind that stains your hands with proof. He talks about margins and menus and ovens that never sleep. When he listens, he actually listens—head tilted, eyes steady, not scanning for exits or weaknesses. He feeds people for a living. That feels important in a year where everyone else wanted to consume me.
Did I say love? No. I said food. There’s a difference. Or maybe not. The glass is empty again. How did that happen?
The president says the year was hard but necessary. My ex says I owe him closure. The new man says, Eat, you forgot to eat. And somehow that’s the most radical sentence of all.
I’m thinking about the past year like it’s a song I almost remember. The chorus keeps slipping. The verses repeat. I know there was anger. There was fear. There was a night I cried into the sink because the mirror wouldn’t look back at me kindly. There was a morning with sunlight and coffee and the sudden, ridiculous belief that I might survive myself.
Eggnog is now just milk with ambition. Cigarettes taste like punctuation I’m misusing.
If this post makes sense, I’ve failed. The year didn’t make sense. The men didn’t. The speeches didn’t. I am not a lesson. I am not a resolution. I am a woman at a table, glass tipped, smoke rising, thinking about power and kitchens and the way time keeps pouring whether you ask it to or not and—
—wait, what was I saying?
Right.
Next year.
Or maybe just tomorrow.