Flat teeth chew my intestines. I’ve ingested something disagreeable. It being New Years Day, I can think of many potential culprits from the menu of the night before, not limited to the cheese plate I remember sitting happily in front of at party #3. Was it the Manhattan I accepted to accompany the cheese? Was it the disco dancing that led me out of 2017? Was it the gratuitous sex when we got home? My arms are all scratched up from the sequins on the shirt I wore. I clench my abdominals, trying to gauge if I need to take another trip to the bathroom.
I usually begin a New Year unintentionally refreshed. In my youth, New Years Eve was inevitably disastrous and often dangerous, and so, for the most part, I avoid any type of festivity. I’ve spend many a New Years on a windy island in New England with my parents, where we fall asleep by 11:00. One lovely New Years Eve involved camping alone on the snowy peaks of some mountains in Argentina. Last year I spend the night, alone again, at the Holiday Inn at JFK airport. I was only a few miles away from my own Brooklyn apartment, but I didn’t want to celebrate with my boyfriend’s cousins, who were staying there for the holiday. That’s the kind of New Year’s misanthrope I tend to be.
All that being said, I don’t regret spending this New Years Day in my pajamas, doing a puzzle and complaining every hour that I feel “crummy.” Last night, we took at least five taxis and I don’t think any of the drivers regret us as passengers. We danced, we drank, we met a friend of a friend of the late great Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He was wearing a iridescent pastel rainbow shirt, and my boyfriend convinced me to get his number. So maybe, one day soon, I’ll see if I can meet someone who once knew my idol. That would be the cherry on top of what was not at all a disastrous New Years Eve.
La Giraffa 