All I can remember of that night is that all the souls that surrounded the funeral of my will were stranded in spaces between the desirable and the religious, and that the year would close on a note I would feel ringing on my last breath. It was the 31st and there was no more time to repent from the works of my impressive innertia, being pushed around by the winds that whistle on fields I will never see again. I decidedly stopped my own heart that day and I would like to waste a few minutes of your time to explain why all was lost.

I woke up late. Late for nothing, as I didn’t have any plans, but too late for anything. It was the last day of December. Even though the house held only three people in it, its contents were travelling up and down making the corridor an impatient highway. They were late; their pace felt like the blinding light of that same morning — a light whose absence from my day left me searching for it or I wouldn’t have energy to open my eyes, much like the religious see God in spaces of void. Perhaps the light of that morning was too strong, for I wished they would just stop running around — maybe just like finding God’s hand in your day of death may make you wish He would just sit down and watch you the way He always does.

My sister was going to celebrate the New Year with some friends and my beloved grandmother was going to church. It’s almost always like this, now that it’s just the three of us. However, they didn’t notice I hadn’t told them my plans for the New Year’s, and they were midly curious to see me waking up five hours or so before the day was over with no plans for the night’s events. I happened to be as depressed as a dog without a bone, and the clothes that hovered over the body of my desire were black, stretched and borrowed. There was no more space for a course of action on that day — all that was left was the company of the fruits of my sadness, nourishing it like an animal eats the grass and, later in life, feeds the grass.

They asked me if I wanted to follow them to the places they would go. I simply don’t think I would get along with my sister’s friends and I’ve been to church on New Year’s eve a couple of times before; I wasn’t feeling it too. I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I stayed there alone while they both left. On my living room there are a few picture frames of my mother. I looked at them for a minute and reminded myself of the New Year’s eve six years before. It was kind of similar, although the house was fuller. I didn’t have any plans and everyone else had plans so I would stay at my house. Everyone had plans — except for my mother. It was her last New Year’s, although none of us knew that, and she was beginning to feel a bit too tired to go out. Or maybe she saw me alone and wished to be with me. I don’t know, since I can’t ask her now. All I know is she got herself dressed, put some make-up on and we sat on the living room talking a bit and waiting for the big moment while watching television. I remember the Christmas tree was still up, so she sat in front of it, grabbed our dog called Maggie and asked me to take some pictures. I remember so fondly of that moment everytime I see those pictures. We hugged at midnight, celebrated a lot, but she said she was feeling tired and went to bed to sleep a bit earlier. With her it was a bit hard to feel alone, although I get haunted by thinking about how depressed I also felt during that time. How I was able to be sad with that blinding light beside me I will never know, but while I was thinking about that day six years later I got reminded that she was gone, and Maggie had just left us a month before.

I was alone, so I turned on the TV. There was a kind of show going on waiting for the New Year to come, and they felt happy so I tried to feel happy. They kept talking about turning the page and clean slates and new beginnings, while I was trying my hardest to understand how things could go so wrong. I had no faith on the next day, and the year that came with it felt equally diabolical, stretching across my words and being the period to my phrase. The house felt specially empty at that moment — there were no sounds of the steps of Maggie across the corridor, and the howls she made when my grandmother would leave the house. It was just me, or rather, I felt the absence of myself, too, like the embodiment of an idea that never came to form. However, there was an other absence, an empty box living on the corner of the night.

It was the time of the countdown. I was sitting on my couch watching the TV. Everyone seemed so happy and hopeful. I looked at the room flooded with nothingness, and the numbers started to pour down as the light that leaked like a late rain. About halfway there, I thought about someone. Someone who was part of that year and occupied most minutes of it. I thought about how the house was empty of her, too. But I also thought about how she would be holding the hands of a special partner, and kissing him as the clock threw the zeroes. Suddenly, I wished for time to stop just so that moment wouldn’t happen — just so I could in some way prevent love as an action like the violent crossing of a river, to crown love as a thought and as an expression, like poetry never read. I wasn’t jealous or hateful. I was simply lost, as an animal that sees its own reflection on the mirror and can’t separate the self from the strange, the other from the another or the poem from the pen.

I don’t live in that night anymore, but sometimes I feel like my soul did manage to stop time, and my mind got addicted to meaning in a world without intent. If I were ever to change that moment I would’ve liked to get out and watch the world and see it breaking in a silent night, presently making me escape from the tar-like veil of the sun that harbors my mind and instead be melted by the light of a moon that doesn’t know my name.

About the text: I was encouraged by a professor to write nonfiction. I have written nonfiction before many times, but I was so focused on writing fiction these past few days that I didn’t realize I forgot the pleasure of the reality. So I decided to write about one of the last days I felt actually depressed, since I hadn’t thought about it ever since it happened. I am actually quite fine now, most of the time. Life is a tricky little thing, and I wish to be able to write a more loving and positive text next. You can check out other texts I wrote through the indexes on the homepage.

Cover art from artist Brian Level, song is by Tom Waits but the video is from the channel Alasabyss on Youtube, with captions on Portuguese made by me (it was originally meant for a text in portuguese that I scrapped).