The year leaves the way smoke does—slow, stubborn, curling back into my hair even after I open all the windows. I tell myself it’s finished, boxed, archived, footnoted. But the calendar flips, and somehow the old sentences follow me into the new margins. I pour another coffee—no, not coffee, something braver—and stare at the idea of January as it might blink first.
I keep thinking about distance. About how we measure it when we’re tired. Days, years, lovers. How far is far enough to stop being followed by your own echoes?
The year that just went by was loud. Too many voices, too many interpretations of me spoken by people who never asked. I learned that memory can be weaponized, that love can be rebranded as surveillance, that an ex can become a weather system—always present, always “just passing through.” I learned new routes home, new names for fear, new ways to laugh it off in public, and catalog it privately like evidence I promise myself I’ll never need.
And yet—here comes the new year, naïve and clean as a hotel towel.
I’m supposed to make resolutions. I resolve instead to look up.
Mars has been on my mind. That rust-colored punctuation mark hanging in the dark. I read about its dust storms and failed rivers and feel a strange kinship. A planet that almost held life, maybe did, once. A place that wants to be left alone but keeps getting visitors planned for it anyway.
There’s something comforting about the math of space. Distances so vast they laugh at obsession. No texts reach Mars. No late-night drive-bys. No “I was just worried about you.” Just silence, radiation, and the hum of your own breath inside a suit that keeps you alive if you follow the rules.
Could I escape there? I ask it half-joking, half-serious, like everything else I ask these days. Would the red planet care about my past? Would it ask for explanations? Or would it simply let me land, plant a flag made of unfinished sentences, and start again with a vocabulary that doesn’t include his name?
The new year promises productivity, relevance, and momentum. I nod along. But privately, I’m interested in trajectory. In velocity. How fast do you have to move to break orbit?
Maybe I won’t go to Mars. Maybe I’ll just keep the idea of it close, like a talisman. A reminder that there are places—real or imagined—where the gravity is different, where the pull of old stories weakens, where you can finally stop looking over your shoulder and start looking out.
The year ahead stretches like a launch pad. I don’t know if I’m leaving the ground yet. But I’m counting down.