This is it. This is the year you will sort out the drawer next to the hob. This is the year you will find love. This is the year you will limp out into, like Winona at the end of Heathers, lighting a fag on the embers of your ex. With a certain swagger. A dark sort of acceptance. This is the year you will be confident in the knowledge that David Bowie will not die, that Hillary Clinton will not lose, and that half the UK will not be left reeling at the realisation it doesn’t know its neighbours. This is the year Harambe will not be shot.
This is the year your plans for a “nice New Year’s Day walk” will not meet you in the darkness of 4pm shattered on the kitchen floor. This is the year you will stroll across the heath, belly full of toast, nodding at dog walkers with a holiness that more than makes up for the horrors of last night.
This is the year you will stop pretending to be in control in meetings, and actually unlock the secret level that enables you to look a colleague in the eye and politely tell them they’re wrong. This is the year you will decide what you like. What kinds of chairs. What kinds of sandwich. This is the year you will decide what you want to do for work, rather than what you think your dad might have wanted. This is the year you will watch an entire episode of a Channel 4 drama without looking at your phone.
This is the year you will look in the mirror and think, “Fine.” A full-length mirror, in sunlight, no less than halfway through the working day. You will rub cream into your face that evening with the firm care of a Kensington masseuse. This is the year you will get rid of all trousers that make you feel like a failure, all shoes that call their own Ubers.
This is the year that the older temps told you would come as you sat, 19, and nervous during their fag break – the year everything slips comfortably into place. This is the year you will get back in touch with them, those old friends you left behind when you moved out of the world and on to the internet for its mild winters and promise of summer. You’ll sit round a real-life table and look at pictures of their kids, and cackle when Leah spills your drink all over the chips when gesticulating during a story about lilies.
This is the year when the pressure to change – the pressure that is traditionally amplified today – retreats in a tide of blue, rather than, as in previous Januaries, becoming a furious string section in your head, preventing you from moving even sideways. A pressure which once led only to inertia and disappointment will this year be replaced by a kind of blooming, much like when a dinner is cancelled and you sink back into the sofa with all the wonder of an evening free.
This is the year when, instead of attempting your usual outrageous improvements re friendship, fitness or intelligence, you will succeed in doing things such as: using those colour-catcher sheets in the washing machine. Reading the business pages of a newspaper. Looking after a friend’s baby for a whole afternoon while they sit at yours and watch Transparent. This is the year you stop apologising for the food you cook.
This is the year you will walk past a vegetable stall and laugh at the size of an avocado. You will take it home where your boyfriend will laugh, too. You’ll cut it in half, spoon out the stone, and eat it together, and the whole thing will take ages and ages. This is the year you will get everything you want, because you will want a little less. This is the year the cactus will flower. This is the year you will learn all your online passwords without having to check the desktop document cunningly titled Carpet Estimates 2013. This is the year you will stop getting cold calls from charities that had almost made you give up giving. This is the year you stay home from parties to which you’d only have gone to avoid missing out. This is the year you will catch sight of your sullen reflection in the dark screen between Netflix episodes and smile at the self-portrait – a cup of tea balanced on your chest, glasses low on your nose, this is you, and it will be you tomorrow, too.
This is the year. This is it.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
