For as long as I can remember, every new year, every birthday, I have wished for the same thing. This year I wished for nothing at all. I have indulged in a year of consumption and hedonism. I’ve redeemed my good taste for the company of paintings and well-constructed clothing. Why wish when you can?

Two years ago I wrote that I pity the man who acquires knowledge only to let it rot away in the cage of his mind, and today I get to experience the disgust that is self-pity. Will a bird born in a cage wish for flight? Will she understand that it is her duty to fly? At the beginning of last year I decided it would be a year of spontaneity, discomfort, and sweet perfume. Rushing about I have developed a habit of blunt urgency that has left behind a trail of fractured pieces of my identity. Somehow it feels like there are more and more pieces to pick up each year. It’s not any easier the second time around.

They say that the year of the snake is one of shedding skin: the letting go of old habits and other irritants that have clung on past their time. I find that the worst diseases are burried much deeper than the skin. Am I supposed to cut out my heart and my brain too? I’ve always found it an admirable trait to be comfortable holding contradiction within oneself but perhaps I’ve become too comfortable with dissonance these days. There have been days where I don’t even hear the wrong notes while I’m practicing piano … In my apartment there’s a broken mirror I held on to because I thought it looked pretty. And though I have another mirror now, I still return to examine myself in the broken one.

Have we reached the end of the beginning? Or do we now face the beginning of the end? My parents’ cooking tastes better and better with each visit home. Instinctively do I know that, cumulatively, I may only have a few more months with them? When I catch up with N in Chicago we often joke about what we’ll see at our 10 year reunion and I silently wonder how many more times I’ll get to see him before then. For most of the conversation we continue to make attempts divining the future. We often talk about what we hope to build in the next year but more so now I find myself wondering who will still be around. It’s much easier for me to mourne than to celebrate, so for practice sake let’s celebrate another year: the year I flew across the Williamsburg bridge and felt the battery of the wind on my forearms for the first time; the year I read more about linear regression than anything else; the year of Issey Miyake L’eau d’Issey Pour Homme.