This is it: the last day of the year and the last page in this journal. I just wish there was something worth reflecting on or worth writing about. There isn’t. Just like yesterday, and the day before, I bussed tables and mopped floors. I sang happy birthday and watched people have a good time, or at least preparing to go have one at a party somewhere else. And then I came home, and everything felt so empty. Mom and Dad are out, and I’ve watched about as much Netflix as I can handle. I know school is supposed to start up next week, but I just can’t imagine that it’ll make any meaningful change. I just miss
I wasn’t sure what I was about to write for the object of that sentence. There was enough space on the page for one word, and I had no idea what to do with it. I had initially wanted to write Alora – Alora, my once best friend and for a long time maybe (but now definitely not) more – but Alora wasn’t exactly it. It was something about Alora, associated with her, certainly, but it wasn’t her. Nor was it the friendship, the memories, or the thrills and terrors of falling in love. Those, I knew could be replaced – after all, I was in 10th grade and had witnessed the merry-go-round of love enough times to know that even the most heart wrenching breakups could be replaced by another romance (no matter how many sappy Adele songs I listened to in the meantime). No, this year, I lost something more permanent, more central to who I was, and there was real reason to believe it was not coming back, even if I couldn’t find the word to name it.
I was about to leave the sentence unfinished but found the implications too macabre even for me. Instead, I closed my eyes and wrote the only thing I could think of, the only thing that even came close to what I was feeling.
I opened my eyes and read it again. I just miss the magic. I smiled, and as I did, I heard cheers and the whistle of firecrackers outside, my neighbors celebrating the turning of the year.
An earlier me would have believed there was some magic in the moment, a special hour that gave extra weight to wishes and magic spells. Indeed, it was one year ago today that Alora and I had snuck off to the banks of the Savannah, hoping to catch a catfish at exactly the stroke of midnight, since Alora had told me that such a catch would grant them a wish in exchange for its life. We hadn’t caught anything, of course, since neither of us could figure out how to bait the hook, even with YouTube to help. But when it was just the two of us, sitting hunched up against each other with a shared blanket to fight off the cold, exchanging ghost stories and jokes and anything that came to mind, I had believed the magic of the hour. And when my phone pushed a notification that the new year had come, I silently thanked a catfish whose life I had spared with my ineptitude in exchange for that night.