Another new year post
Life and death at the end of 2025
The evening before NYE I sat in the bath with many candles lit, candles that were Christmas presents. I was thinking about a friend who died, suddenly, just after Christmas, a former housemate of my boyfriend’s. On the train back to London we read the tributes to him online, as my boyfriend made calls to the people who didn’t know the news yet. We saw him just a couple of weeks before Christmas, a brief surprise visit to the warehouse where he used to live. He was in fine fettle and excited, telling us about the exhibitions he had seen that day, the places he had cycled, the old stomping grounds. We were all really happy to see him and, unexpectedly, more of us than usual were gathered, one of those festive Saturdays where you go out and about and scoop people up and bring them home, and suddenly it’s a party. We passed him around from arm to arm. Later I fell asleep giggling and cosy and the warehouse was full of friends, the close of the year approaching.
I lay there in the water and thought then that it was my fifth year in a row of lying in that water at that time of year, the same bathroom, my toes above the foam. I remembered the December of four years ago and first meeting this friend, when I would turn up at their warehouse late at night and sidle into my now-boyfriend’s room, or go over on a Friday evening and end up hanging out there until Sunday, seduced by company and mimosas and films on the projector.
I lost another friend at the start of the year, too, and the world losing two incredible people at untimely ages made me think a lot, in 2025, about the fragility and unfairness of life. In 2025 I felt regret for all the time I have wasted, for all the times I was ungrateful and selfish and cowardly when I should have been kind, should have been strong, should have acted with more integrity. But I felt the deep privilege of being alive, too, and how much more I want to do with it. How much more there is I want to do, if I am lucky enough to get to do it.
Some things change year to year, while some things barely do. My toenails sticking out of the foam chipped and ragged with scraps of lavender, where they always used to be perfectly pedicured. Soon I won’t live alone. Hopefully I won’t be alone in my body for the whole year. One person in this house will turn into two, and then could turn into three. It’s the same slice of hallway that’s always been visible from the bath, but now it’s newly painted, carpeted, after years of a view of scuffed wall and filthy floorboard. Slowly, a ghost house has become my home. A place where friends can stay when they need, where I can give them clean pyjamas and bring them tea and run them a bath, always enough dinner for someone extra. Life, stupidly and amazingly, continues. I may not be able to see what’s ahead but I can see the progression that led me here, the years stacking up, in a way that feels clearer and more coherent than before.
My sister had a daughter on New Year’s Eve, which already feels like one of the most amazing things to have ever happened. I woke up at five am as if with a second sense, moments before her husband Facetimed me from the hospital to show me the new arrival, my sister dazed, a tiny red creature curled into her chest like a comma. Strange and beautiful newborn animal. Later that morning I walked exuberantly in the frosty air all the way to Broadway Market, drank a coffee sitting by the canal under a very blue sky, and the world felt clean and full of potential. Every week over the last nine months my sister sent me a photo of her bump, without fail, and I would try to imagine my niece contained inside her somehow. Her pregnancy has brought us closer together, even as she makes a life on the other side of the world.
I’ve also been watching Spanish TV show The New Years, and really enjoying it. The concept is that it follows a couple (one born on NYE, the other born on the 1st of January), through ten different New Years Eves, starting with the one where they meet. I find myself drawn to stories of an episodic nature lately, the classic being One Day, obviously, but also Days of Light by Megan Hunter, for example, and the forthcoming Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. I think it’s maybe because I was living in a panic mode for a while where I was unable to conceptualise the future, or because I’m just thinking more generally now about the shape my collected years are forming. Getting older, getting more wistful. What does a life, distilled and viewed in rapid time, really look like? How are other people living theirs? Anyway, I’m enjoying it – the sense of things happening off-screen, the move from the passionate early years of a relationship to ones that are more challenging, the surprisingly explicit sex that feels genuinely intimate. I’ve only watched the first four episodes so far, so there’s over half a decade left. Anything could happen.
This year I’m making one big resolution only, and continuing with smaller ones from previous years. (Keep making better decisions. Keep trying to act less like a flailing animal.) On New Year’s Day I eased into my hangover by Eat Pray Love on my friend Krista’s sofa under a heated blanket, eating potato waffles, before going home. On my way back I thought this is the last hangover of my life; the idea made me feel peaceful. The night before had been perfect. Often I was close to tears. I was alone for the rest of New Year’s Day, but I didn’t mind. Across the water there was a funeral taking place, and I thought of the people I loved there, gathering. There was a beautiful dawn that hit the sky about eight. I was glad to have been awake to see it.
