Nieuwjaar

The first morning of the year arrived looking suspiciously like the morning after a very loud night. #

I woke up late with one foot outside the duvet, my hair performing something that would have required structural engineering to reproduce deliberately, and that dry champagne feeling in my mouth that immediately reminded me why water is one of civilisation’s finest inventions. 2015. I lay there for a few seconds looking at the pale light around the curtains and listening to Amsterdam being unusually quiet, or perhaps I was simply still half deaf from last night’s fireworks. Yuri was beside me, awake but refusing to admit it, and when I moved he said, «Happy New Year, Bambolina,» without opening his eyes. «Again?» «It still counts.» Apparently it does. We eventually got up, although eventually is doing heroic work in that sentence, and the house looked exactly like a house on January first should look. Glasses. A bottle. Crumbs. One abandoned napkin. My shoes nowhere near each other. A tiny piece of something shiny on the floor that neither of us could identify. The Christmas tree still glowing because I switched it on before making coffee, priorities intact. Outside, the street contained the remains of last night and a few people moving carefully through the afternoon as if everyone had silently agreed not to make sudden noises. I made coffee and stood by the window holding the mug with both hands. I always expect New Year’s Day to feel more different than it does. Midnight makes such a performance of the border, all those numbers and kisses and fireworks and champagne and counting, and then morning comes and the same cups are in the cupboard, the same face looks back from the bathroom mirror, the same person wants breakfast. I like that more now. I don’t need January first to manufacture a new Alice. I like the one who arrived here. Twenty-nine, living in Amsterdam, still Italian in every possible cellular way, still incapable of understanding people who voluntarily drink bad coffee, still listening to country music and hardcore as though those things were born to share a playlist, still writing here after all these years, still with Yuri, still calling Mom and Dad, still collecting perfume faster than any reasonable person could use it. Nothing requires replacing this morning. We cleaned eventually. Music went on. I found my other shoe. Yuri opened a window for approximately thirty seconds and I accused him of attempted murder because the cold entered immediately. We ate oliebollen left from yesterday and got powdered sugar everywhere. Later we walked because staying inside all day would have made us feel even more like furniture. Amsterdam was beautiful in that January first way, slightly exhausted, slightly dirty, wonderfully calm. I saw bicycles with frost on them, people carrying coffee, somebody already jogging, which felt unnecessarily ambitious. We came home before dark, although dark comes so early that this sounds more impressive than it was. Tea at five. Four biscuits. New year, same mathematics. Tonight I have no resolutions written beside me. No list of improvements. No declaration that this is going to be my year, because they are all my years while I am alive inside them. I have things I want, obviously. Places I want to see. Things I want to learn. Dutch I want to speak better. Photographs I want to take. Music I want to hear too loudly. Work I want to do well. People I want to keep close. But none of that needs to become a contract with January. The first day can simply be a day. Yuri has just put two glasses of water on the table, the tree is still on behind him, and outside somebody has found one final firework left over from last night and apparently decided four minutes ago was the correct moment to use it.

Remember me, Eclipse.