New Year

The passage of time has always been difficult for me. I’ve been overly obsessed with hours and minutes and dates and months and years, overly cognizant of how they all just march on forward relentlessly leaving our past in the dust. This forward arrow of time always depresses me a bit, as I always feel that I am losing an old friend with every tick of the clock or turn of the calendar page.

Since my early childhood, lying in bed at night I’d stare at the clock on the nightstand and watch with a combination of fascination and dread as the minutes would roll by relentlessly.

Now it’s 1:15 am. Now, 1:16. It will never be 1:15am on October 17, 1977 ever again. Look, now it’s 1:30 am.

Time was like a living, breathing entity who’d bond with me for a moment before leaving and suddenly take up residence in the past, where there was really no difference between two hours ago and 30 years ago. Or a century ago. It was all forever over.

And this notion would literally make me sad, the permanent loss of a particular time.

(Now look: I’m well aware that to the extent that there’s a spectrum, this behavior and thought process places me somewhere along that developmental continuum. I’ve come to terms with that; the fact that I’m openly sharing these thoughts should make that evident. I know I’m odd.)

The worst time loss, however, was always the new year. A whole year, 365 days, would be suddenly lost on January 1st at midnight.

“It will never be 1981 again,” I’d say on New Years Eve of 1981, for example, and everyone would chuckle. But I was serious, even though I’d also laugh at the apparent absurdity of the statement. I mean, sure, it will never be xxxx year again, but what of it?

But to me, it was a big deal, a real loss.

When the old year gives way to the new, the old year and everything it contains is forever frozen in time: static, never changing, all the events and happenings of that year forever locked in a figurative time capsule. Each minute, each day, each month, and each year we experience afterward moves us further and further away from those moments. We may move forward, but some things do not. Some things will always be “back then,” forever stuck in that old time period. They become objects in our rearview mirror, quickly receding away from us.

Which brings me to the current “now.” 2025. We’re in the last days of 2025, and soon it will no longer be 2025. We will never see 2025 again. And this year, especially this year, it will be devastating to me.

Adrianna was alive in 2025. Then, almost mid-year, she was not. But she’s still a part of 2025, and soon, when 2025 recedes into the past and is no longer the now, it will feel to me as if she’s being left behind. As the minutes and days and months and years continue to move forward, she will be left further behind, back in 2025.

As long as it’s still 2025 it’s sort of like I’m still near her, that she’s still a part of everything. This is still her present; she’s not just a relic of the past.

But that is quickly coming to an end, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. Trying to hold on to time has always been a losing proposition for me, but the stakes were never this high.

I don’t want Adrianna to be a relic of the past. I don’t want to let this year go away yet.