I write this now as the first creation of the new year. It is always strange, labelling things with a number, especially years, and particularly upon the arrival of a new number. A year is long enough that by around March or April the number assigned to it roots itself as a seemingly permanent facet of life, and then, when the number suddenly increases by a single digit, one feels a sense that something is wrong, the 5 is wrong, it isn't a 4. This feeling then cascades, bursting with platitudes of melancholic ephemerality that despite being tattered from overuse are able to evoke the most unsettling of thoughts; that life is ever so slowly drifting further from its beginnings — languidly wading deeper and deeper out into an ocean of time. The numbers now show as more abstract and undefinable things. When you're closer to something, each step away seems substantial, each year possesses more meaning, more milestones. Now, however, at a greater distance, I’m unable to definitively say “yes, a year has passed.” Instead, I look upon the numbers on a calendar, see that the year has increased by another value then anxiously ponder how that happened. This owes partially to age’s effusive power and part my own mind’s fallibility when attempting to condense and assign chronologies to feelings and memories. I should think now that those stark divisions I perceived as a child between the years, the flamboyantly overstated events that represent a clear milestone in my development, will continue to sink towards deeper and more inaccessible recesses — shining now with a faint twinkle (a pallid remnant of the once ablaze form it took) reminiscent of some impossibly far away star projected onto the light-washed night sky of a city; a star that, like many actual stars, represents some part of a constellation—an era—complete with its own ill-remembered folklore and tall tales.
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