by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: January 08, 2008

New Year's Eve is one of those evenings that I have come to dread. With each passing year, as the date draws closer, I find my thoughts encompassed by an ever increasing degree of fear over the upcoming event. Irrational? Yes. Something that I can control? Nope, I've tried!

Years and years ago when I was a wee child, a comment made at one of our family's famous New Year's Eve Parties by a drunken guest, burned into my subconscious, and has remained there to this day. He was just an old neighbor who had drank far too much whiskey that night, but as he grasped desperately onto one of my aunt's arms, he mumbled into her face a disturbing fact that has remained with me ever since. "Whatever you are doing or feeling at the stroke of midnight is what you will be doing or feeling for the rest of the New Year ya know". Then he plastered a huge sloppy kiss on her that lasted practically the entire magical midnight minute while everyone else in the room shouted, hooted, twirled noise makers and popped balloons. For me it was like they were the only two people in the world and I was enchanted by their actions. I couldn't take my eyes off them. It was magic!

Now to a little child the words spoken by this drunken neighbor held an almost magical if not mystical quality within them. As a kid I thought it was a wonderful sentiment and I felt privileged to have overheard this very special information. This was the one night each year when I was allowed to stay up as late as I wanted. Friends, relatives, and neighbors came over and everyone drank, danced and ate till long after midnight and one by one they stumbled off into the darkness and home. Some even just fell asleep where they sat. It was almost as special an event as Christmas. What could possibly be more heart warming or magical than New Year's Eve?

But that was a New Year's Eve thought that occurred long before at 18 my heart was wrenched from my chest by a callous boyfriend caught necking with another girl at that magical of all moments in time. A New Year's eve long before I was forced to endure the misery of that all too gross slobbery midnight kiss of an ancient uncle with rotting teeth(Now I know how my aunt felt that night). And it was years before the night that in horror I turned first left, then right only to find that the people on either side of me had turned the opposite direction from me, and I was standing there at midnight ALONE. All AlONE! The forecast for the year ahead suddenly becoming more than my

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>