New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day have always been my least favorite holidays. They feel sort of morbid, a bizarre combination of popping celebratory champagne while singing “Auld Lang Syne,” which inarguably sounds like a funeral song, despite that very wholesome scene at the end of When Harry Met Sally. The holiday feels ridden with irony—a traditional New Year’s Eve centers itself around debauchery, while New Year’s Day is about making new, healthy resolutions. If you’re really serious about setting intentions for the New Year, it’s probably best that you abstain from the drunken festivities of New Year’s Eve to avoid the inevitable New Year’s Day hangover and settle soberly into that eerie mortality feeling that January 1st always seems to bring about, as we become momentarily hyper-aware of the fleeting nature of time.
New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day have always been my least favorite holidays, but I’ve always celebrated them. But this year, I don’t think I can.
Today is New Year’s Eve, and I am intensely unamused by it. I record Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rocking Eve. I pour a glass of champagne. I get dressed up because there’s nothing to dress up for anymore and I’m tired of wasting my outfits. I think about tomorrow. We’re still going to be in a pandemic, anticipating something, waiting for some boot to drop. Changing the calendar isn’t going to fix anything or transport us back to normalcy.
Blame it on my lack of amusement with the holiday prior to the pandemic, but celebrating this new year feels tone deaf—laughter at a funeral. What should we raise our glasses to? To loss? To grief?
Tell me, what are we not mourning?
The other night I dreamt that I walked into an old building downtown. The floorboards creaked underneath the echoes of conversation from a group of elderly people in the farthest part of the room. The pandemic had no relevance to the dream, so I thought, but when the group began to approach me to greet me, I backpedalled, appalled at their lack of masks, but I could not exit the building before they got much closer than six feet away from me. The elderly woman spoke in a soft, sweet voice, asked me for a hug, and I had a visceral reaction to another human’s presence. I woke up.
Before my eating disorder wreaked havoc on my ability to go out to eat, my favorite restaurant in the Bay Area was Franchino’s on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. It was a family-owned hole in the wall in North Beach, decorated with 1970s-esque pastel paint colors and faux Renaissance murals, candles on every table (tables positioned much too close to each other, but the food made up for the lack of space), and every waitress was a daughter of the woman who made your pasta. Some of the tables were adjacent to the windows facing the avenue and you could people-watch while dipping hot, savory bread into peppery olive oil. The older woman who made all of the pasta would happily stand by my table for fifteen minutes giving me all of her tips for how to make homemade gnocchi.
Franchino’s is closed now.
I haven’t been since 2017. I always assumed it would still be there for me to return when I fully recovered from my eating disorder, to eat spaghetti carbonara, to drink Chianti, to talk to the cook about how long to knead dough, to re-experience the joy of food, to make a new memory.
The Cliff House, a San Francisco establishment since the Civil War, has outlived detrimental, mysterious disasters, shipwrecks, and fires. The last time I was there, I saw the vast Pacific beaming through large windows as I sipped wine with someone I loved. I genuinely don’t even remember what I ordered to eat because the view was so captivating. The ocean seemed to extend for eternity. The water, a miraculous shade of blue, shone with the sun’s September golden specks, and I sat there, mesmerized. Sitting in the grandeur of the Cliff House while staring out into the infinite sea gave me that spectacular feeling of being so big yet so small at once.
This morning a crowd of people gathered around the building watched as they removed the sign from the top of the Cliff House. It is permanently closed, as of today, after 157 years.
I obsess over the inability to build new memories, especially at the places that now only exist in history. They vanished, all within a year. These building are empty, closed but still standing, and their image, floating at the forefront of my mind, makes me hyper-aware of the pace and intensity of these changes.
Are the sands of time truly slipping through the cracks in my fingers that quickly?
“Auld Lang Syne” literally translates to “old long since,” but actually means something similar to “old times” or “the olden days.” It sounds like a funeral song because it is nostalgic. It remembers the friendships and relationships of the past, the times that are no longer tangible, the lives lost, the hugs we currently cannot have, the holidays missed, restaurants that have closed, and the streets that are now empty.
So maybe this year, I won’t celebrate the turn of the calendar from December 31 to January 1, but I will celebrate memories, and feelings, and sentimentality, and yes, I will mourn. I will mourn, I will remember, and I will hope.