Turn The Page

I’m standing at the favorite part of the house on New Year’s Eve. I look at the revelers and wonder what exactly is that they are celebrating? Is it of about saying good riddance to the terrible year gone by or saying hello to the unknown that the New Year promises to bring? Either way the drunken boys are giving the hapless constables a torrid time at the moment!

For some, the sober kinds, the couple of hours running up to the midnight is a good time to look back at the year gone by and round up the events.  I’m trying to do the same since I’m sober too (after many years!). Looking back can be exciting as well as disappointing.

The trips were kind of exciting, well at least some of them. It might be a small world but with every new place and every new experience, you feel that’s not true. The work was exciting. I know, I know, but guess I made it to be. Another exciting part was the meals that I prepared for myself; full jugaad. Meeting friends in a foreign place and going ape shit crazy through the night was exciting. But the most exciting thing of the year has to be the news of ‘double trouble’. This was one excitement that made me shiver.

The disappointments list, as usual, was longer. I couldn’t empower anyone. I tried but not well enough. And for the third year running I didn’t pick up the six strings. I finished my “magnum opus” but couldn’t go anywhere with it. I should have watched the words. I came close to doing one of the things on my bucket list, but didn’t go all the way.  And again as usual, was disappointed of letting go of all the chances that I had to be a better man.

After doing a recap of the year, there is also a recap of all the new year’s eves of the years gone by. I try to remember the place, the people and the midnight moments.  Some of them shine out brightly like the fireworks that I see above right now, while some of them were as dull as the recent The Simpsons episodes. And some of them I don’t even remember a thing because maybe I never bothered to make a memory of them. Then you wonder which are the ones, that given a chance you would want to relive. Most of the times it’s the ones in which you were young and stupid. But there is no point wondering, as Carraway says in The Great Gatsby, “You can’t repeat the past”.

And then after all these thoughts are through, I sit up straight in the chair, look at the horizon and get ready to turn the page.