New Year’s Eve
Day 38 – December 31, 2025
The world is celebrating tonight. Fireworks somewhere in the distance. People counting down. Champagne corks popping like humanity collectively decided we all deserve a victory lap.
Meanwhile I’m sitting on my couch with Roger wondering when exactly we decided midnight had magical reset powers. January 1st is really just December 31st in a fresh outfit with better PR.
Still, something about tonight carries weight.
Maybe because endings always do, even when they’re artificial. Maybe because this year did not pass quietly. It clawed. It rearranged things. It took a hammer to my understanding of safety, trust, innocence, and just how fast a life can shift when someone else makes a cruel decision.
This year tried to dismantle me.
And there were moments — real ones, ugly ones, private ones — where I honestly did not know how I was going to keep going. Moments where the future felt abstract. Like something other people got to have while I was busy learning how to survive inside a reality I never asked for.
But here I am.
Still here.
Not the same woman who walked into this year, obviously. The version of me from January was softer in certain ways. Less suspicious. Less aware of how dark people can be. Less prepared for the ways life can split open and leave you standing there holding pieces of yourself you don’t yet know how to put back together.
But the woman sitting here tonight?
She’s harder to erase.
Quieter. Sharper. Stronger in ways that didn’t exist before. The strange part is I never asked for that strength. I did not order it. I would not have chosen the method of delivery. It arrived through fire and fear and the kind of pain that changes your posture from the inside out.
And yet now that it’s here, I’m beginning to understand its value.
Because there is something different about a woman who knows exactly what it cost her to still be standing.
She doesn’t move through the world the same way.
She sees more.
She wastes less.
She trusts with intention.
She does not mistake softness for weakness, and she no longer confuses survival with surrender.
Roger, for his part, is deeply offended by the fireworks outside. Every loud pop sends him into a dramatic performance where he looks at me like, “Explain this chaos immediately.”
I wish I could, buddy.
Honestly, same.
Tonight the apartment feels calm. The Christmas tree lights are still glowing. The room is soft in that strange in-between way — not quite holiday, not quite ordinary, just suspended there while the year breathes its last few breaths.
And the year that changed everything is finally ending.
I’m still here to watch it go.
That feels important.
More than important, actually.
It feels like proof.
Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.
And midnight quietly approaching as if it has any idea what it’s walking into.
