2015 / Welkom

The year is changing outside the window and I have nothing to ask from it yet. #

2015. Welkom. I am not making a list. No ten promises written neatly enough to make January feel like an examination. No new version of Alice scheduled for tomorrow morning. I like this one. She is twenty-nine, blonde, occasionally impossible, still too attached to perfume and shoes, still capable of moving from Dolly Parton to Rotterdam Terror Corps without psychological injury, still writing after almost twelve years, still taking too many photographs, still counting four biscuits beside tea as if the fifth might destabilise the universe, still learning Dutch, still making mistakes, still laughing when they are funny, still Italian in ways Amsterdam will never remove and Amsterdammer enough that returning home means landing here. Yuri is waiting for me three metres away. The tree is still lit. There are glasses on the table. My camera is somewhere under a scarf. Outside, the sky keeps opening in colour and disappearing into smoke. Somebody downstairs is shouting. Somebody else is laughing. Midnight is here now, properly here, no longer approaching, and I can hear Yuri saying my name again while the computer clock changes its numbers. I am closing this. The room flashes gold against the window and for half a second I can see our reflections inside the fireworks.

Remember me, Eclipse.