Cheer Up, Introspective Kid
I hear the clatter of champagne glasses, and that's when I decide that it's time to leave. I don't mean to make a show of it. It's not like there's anything to be anxious about; I've been quieter than a mouse since I first showed up to this party and nobody will have noticed that I've gone.
Except for Sunset Shimmer. She always notices when I'm here or not. And it's not because she's become magically psychic.
I've gathered my coat and inched my way around the perimeter of chuckling, laughing, gossipping young men and women. I've slipped past the piles of belated, unwrapped Xmas presents and a partially-eated snack table. I can almost feel the crisp cold of night slipping in through the condominium's front door when—sure enough—Sunset stops me.
"Awwwww..." Her exhalation is painted with melancholy, but it's not disappointment that's pronounced it. This was fully expected. She looks at me with those sad turquoise eyes that I used to get lost in five years ago when we once dated. "Leaving so soon, Flash?"
I stop at the front door, turning around as I button up the length of my coat. My eyes rise up, meeting her face. I try to drown the guilt in a hopeful smile. "Gotta work in the morning, Sunset." It's true and yet it's not true. "Retail life. You know how it is."
"But you won't stay for when the ball drops?" she asks, her voice tinged with so much empathy that it burns me. Her face warms with hope, chasing the cold back outside. "We would all love to have you with us for once on New Year's."
She always reminds me of the way I am, which is what makes moments like this ache. I look past her... across the apartment foyer to where several happy friends share a happy breath in a happy huddle around a wide-screen t.v. displaying a city square chock full of snow, sleet, and crazed revelers. Pinkie and Rarity have gotten tipsy first—per the norm—and I can already see Applejack and Rainbow Dash competitively arguing over something while Fluttershy and Twilight share something silly and cute across their smart phones.
There are other people with other names scattered across Sunset's home, waiting for the final hours to lurch on by. There aren't enough shadows in between them to hide, and the night beckons. As always.
"It's... really not my thing, Sunset," I exhale, smiling tiredly at her. I rub a hand across the back of my neck to chase away the goosebumps. "You know me."
"You're right." She nods. "I do." She nods again. "But still, don't you ever get sick of it?"
"Sick of what, exactly?"
She hasn't expected that. I feel a pang of guilt as I see her chew on her bottom lip, as if measuring a pellet of poison in her mouth. Then, with a defeated exhale, she gives me the mother of all manure-eating grins. "You have a point. Guess we see each other all year around, huh?"
I only wish that was more than half-true. "Yeah, guess we do."
We're both nodding again, and then she donates me a warm smile from afar, worthy of a snapshot. The last snapshot of an era. "Happy New Year's, Flash." Warm. Melodic. Sunny. And then she turns around and goes off to rejoin her more joyful friends.
I actually find myself standing at the doorframe with more than a tiny bit of numbness. I blink after the space left behind her Contemplating...
She didn't try getting a hug out of me this year.
The woman must be learning.
Guess who's to blame for that?
I slip on my boots, turn the doorknob, and march out into the chill.
The world is dead on the outside, flickering with chaos on the inside. The streets are bone dry—at least until two and a half hours from now when all the drunks are let loose. But for a blissfully short period of time, everything is empty. Still. Serene—save for the occasional punctuation of random bottlerockets braving the sky several suburbs away.
I avoid the noise, drifting even deeper into the emptiness, with my hands plunged in my jacket pockets and my mouth making mists in the wintry lamplight. I can see the lights of festive homes in my periphery, beyond dense forests of parked cars, marking the sanctuaries where friends and family have gathered to embrace the next rotation. It's a super sacred occasion—and yet it's not, for it happens every year at the same time. With the same over-processed sterility lying patiently beneath the inebriated tide.
Sometimes I wonder when the apathy began... perhaps at the same point when the bitterness ended. Sometime after high school, when I parted ways with all my classmates and realized that it made the world no more or less empty—I had simply been disillusioned into the pretense of comraderie before my graduation cap flew.
I used to feel sorry about myself. Now, I only feel sorry. Every year passes by and I find reasons to see my friends less and less—under the loosely-guarded excuse of trying to find myself more and more. No matter which way the months move me, I always end up here, leaving before the party culminates, uncomfortable with the excitement. The joy. The delicate, fragile facade that is mirth. The higher you get, the further you fall down, and I've plunged too much in my yesterdays to care very much about partaking in each passing festivity.
Lord knows, I've tried. I've tried to be as pleasant as Sunset and all her friends. But I only end up faking it... and hating myself in the process. Not for being foolish but for making it harder for me to get up the next year... the next morning... the next second that I combat this questionable life. And I'm not sure what's brought me to such an overwrought point of regular contemplation. Did I read too much philosophic crap in high school? Was it one too many session of listening to Radiohead in the dark and pretending to be serious about being serious?
I don't know how or when, but at some point I just lost the nerve to be anything but sad. And it's not the soul-crushing, irredeemable sadness that drags poor victims through the hole of a tight noose, but rather the slow ankle-biting ennui that consumes most thirty-five-to-forty-five-year-olds landlocked into the nine-to-five. All things considered, I'm far too stupidly young for a midnight crisis, but it hasn't stopped me from tip-toeing into a dressing room and slipping one on anyways.
And it's not like I'm without hope. I have friends. I have so many friends. But that's a relative term today—friendship. Something that's quantifiable digitally, at the tap of a thumb, in which we forget that first we have to be who we are before we can afford to be who we are. There are so many people so assured of the Tetris block grooves they fit into in this life. Sunset's among them—along with her friends—and while I don't think for a second that any one of them are shallow, I sometimes find their confidence so two-dimensionally perfect and pristine that it has got to be a mistake. Somewhere, all across the world, everyone is making mistakes—except for me.
As in right now, strolling through the frost-kissed lengths of Canterlot, alone with the mists and streetlamps in a world that knows no laughter.
It can't just be me, right?
Every year, I end up in the same place, because I'm certain that I'll find something if I search inward enough. Sunset can't find it. Applejack, Twilight, and the others can't find it. It has to be me. Right here. Right now.
In the same place, every year. What was sacred was lost, but beyond the sterility I can start anew and cultivate truth in a new world discovered, can't I?
Or perhaps...
This instance...
This cold and pallid breath, standing before a half-undecorated christmas tree in the center of the town square... lingering in the haze of a holiday six days dead...
A place I come to with lesser and lesser thunder heralding the moment every year...
...I find that there's nothing to find in the first place.
So, perhaps, it's all some pathetic excuse just to lose myself? And to lose—with it—all anchorage to accountability, the truest and oldest burdens of adulthood... as well as joy.
I'm not crying, and yet I am. It's the same not-crying-crying that every man endures, especially in the darkest and coldest of months... and most especially we few—we many—who self-impose this exile upon ourselves, in want of a change that will never come.
Why did I drift away from all of you?
Did it simply feel easy at the time? As it now feels harder to excuse?
What was so bad about opening up... about being transparent... about exposing each and every one of you to my sins and frailties that I would have to transform them all into a lifestyle to wrap around myself up in at night and sigh to sleep?
You were everything that "friendship" meant to me, a magical thing that transformed the very fabric of my life... of all our lives. And yet—with each passing year—I discovered more things to regret than to rejoice in, and I could already see so many of you drifting away from the closeness that I once cherished... that I suppose I grabbed the oars and shoved off further across the dark waters myself in some valiant effort to own the downward spiral of it all.
When you own nothing but emptiness, it's a very uneventful talent to grow on.
I used to shine. I used to create. I can't remember the last time I was ever proud of something. The music is dust; my guitar hidden. All is now consumption and waiting. Waiting for the end of something... because I've long given up on finding a beginning.
They are tears and yet they are not tears... these things that obscure the lights beyond... that paint the cold dark of night with dim specks of hope. I've kept my mind so shallow, so devoid of mirth, so that I might not have to contemplate the time going by... fully knowing that that glow will grow only dimmer with the hollow years—like this one, now ending—and the only thing I'll ever actually own is the shrowd I've thrown upon it once again.
And just like that, as the grit collects below my eyes from the third time rubbing my face, I am shaken out of the moment. A vibration—a chime. Something that is owned by a person who strives—which is why it's actually melodious.
I reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone. Most things in life are quantifiable, but even the numbers sometimes stretch into feelings if they strike you at the most unexpected of hours.
And it turns out that it's the First Hour. 12:01am of the New Year. I know this, because I am suddenly accosted by a bevy of text messages: not just from Sunset, like most years, but from Twilight and Applejack and Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie and Rarity...
"Happy New Year's, Flash!"
"Have a Happy New Year, Flash."
"Best wishes to you, darling."
"It was nice seeing you today, Flash. Happy New Year's."
"Keep staying awesome, dude."
"Come on by and hang out with us again, partner."
"Happy New Year's, Flashie! XOXOX!!!"
They are not words of pity. I've tasted of that heartlessness before, and it's rarely ever quite so coordinated. Maybe Sunset thought of it and goaded all the others into spamming me. Or maybe they collectively thought of it together. I wouldn't doubt it—not with these girls. They're more than friends; they're superheroes, willing to rescue a moron such as me on a special night like this. Even if my life didn't need saving, there were still thoughts committed to the heart, the one I nearly forgot I had, after years of trying.
A salvo of bottle rockets and fire works erupt sporadically across town, christening the moment, capturing the sheen on my face and the smilie slowly blooming underneath.
Stupid... stupid idiot...
It's going to be all right, idiot.
I may have drifted away, but they never did.
They've just been waiting patiently along the shore with their candles.
I might not drift back to them overnight... but it gives us plenty of chances to wave at each other in the interim.
I put away my phone and sigh warmly into the glare of fireworks. Warm and shocking and wild.
I'll get back on track.
I know I can. I totally can.
Just... gotta stop overthinking it...
Stop expecting it to come in a flash.
I'm going to do awesome and spectacular things.
And this year...
...this is going to be a great year.
So... with a chipper breath... I scuffle about in the frost and make my way home.
And once there, I walk into my room. I strip naked. I slip on some pink women's briefs. And I fire up Pornhub.
Author's Note
F'naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
