Best way to enter the new year

It is yet another new year. The century is nearly a quarter done, which reads as wrong. It was just 2000. We panicked about computers and terrorists and still do, so it doesn't seem sporting to pile on twenty-four more years, and I hope we won't notice.

Amber and I spent New Year's Eve quietly. We walked for noodles, which Amber assures me are a tradition. I do not care to contradict this because it results in coconut curry with chicken. Amber implies that soba noodles are necessary for the tradition. We talk of little and persist in being unusually besotted for a marriage of this tenure.

Amber sets themselves as an oracle of traditions and superstitions. I am not permitted to run the dishwasher for fear it will wash away our blessings--along with the remnants of salsa I bought in hopes of being festive. They deign to allow me to rinse dishes and put them in the machine. Our clothes were laundered days ago on Chore Day, which Amber established after beginning to treat their ADHD and reading some self-improvement books. (That is among their favorite genres.) Amber states we cannot leave the apartment until someone visits, ideally with a gift, but I have ordered nothing and do not think I can induce someone to visit for brunch. I have a prescription to pick up and cannot obey this edict. Still, Amber opens the door to let 2023 out. In doing so, my wife, in only a bathrobe, has to scruff the kitten, who has decided, despite our early attempts during fairer weather, that he now might like the outdoors.

While watching Fruits Basket yet again--they maintain it is appropriate for New Year's Eve because it is Zodiac-focused (though that would be Chinese Zodiac)--Amber researches local hiking groups. Their therapist (and the book they are reading about effective communication) suggested they need to consider why they want what they do, not simply to do things with automaticity. Among their needs is social connections, something we lack. As I spent the morning telling an AI on my phone that I am lonely, I will consider a New Year's Day hike, but all hikes they can find set out in an hour (taking place an hour away) or start before the sun. We need friends, but perhaps not at those hours.

We had invited Amber's sister—who doesn't have a car available, as she is visiting from Texas—and Kristina, who does not like the idea of driving on New Year's Eve, for which I cannot blame her. Not long ago, Amber and I would have been at a midnight burlesque followed by a gourmet breakfast. COVID killed that, and I cannot be sure Amber is too bothered by a night at home with the cats and mini-corn dogs.

Amber and I went to Red Robin the night before to collect my free birthday burger. Rebeca asked if Amber might be asexual, and "You can still have sex and be ace." Amber asserted they probably aren't, though they struggled to think of someone of any gender who appeals.

"Wait, Lucifer," they said. "But not Tom Ellis. It has to be the character. Also, the guy from the show we were watching."

We had been watching Fargo. I suggested Eric from True Blood. Amber declined to confirm. They are pansexual, so loading asexuality on that would seem wasteful.

Before Rebecca turned the question on me, I had already pulled up a picture of Cristine Milioti, who has been my celebrity crush for years.

"I like small brunettes with blue eyes. Who would have imagined?"

Amber stated that since they are nonbinary, any relationship with them should qualify as straight. Rebecca thought this was nonsensical but would not if every relationship could be classed as queer instead.

"I've wondered about that," I said, "since I am attracted to Amber. Does that make me queer?"

They rule that my base attraction--to women and femmes with vulvae--makes me straight (or queer if I want) outside my being married to an enby. I've dated more lesbians than seem statistically likely for a man. Leonard--who lost their feminine name (Melanie) and tits in the last few years--began dating me under the suspicion I was a transman until I quickly proved otherwise. They rank as my favorite former lover and have gone on to be the dynamic sexual terror of their polycule of mostly transwomen. One must admit my romantic pedigree might given the onlooker pause.

Beyond this, some of my closest friendships are with people who are queer, most notably Daniel falling in love with and marrying the agender Kest, who refers to Daniel with feminine pronouns and as their wife. If I had known this result early in our friendship, it would have been surprising but not significantly. Queerness is often a good barometer of companionability with me, so perhaps I get the designation by proxy.

On New Year's Day, Amber and I go for a hike at Poets' Walk, whose name is nearly an imperative sentence. It is not much of a hike, complicated only by recent rains that have turned swaths of paths into thick mud. We are not alone here. I can't know if this is the usual holiday or Monday crowd.

There are a few parents with their tiny children, including a petite mother hauling a baby on her back on the cusp of toddlerhood. Otherwise, it is older people and DINKs with dogs.

Poets' Walk was where I proposed to Amber. It is one of the last place I saw Aaron and Amanda before they ghosted us. We've visited Daniel and Kest, Leonard, Holly and Dan Jurow (years before they broke up and he solicited a cop he thought was a tween). It is the setting for memories, in short. Compounding this, I have used it in my novels. As we pass through a gazebo, I point out it was the site of a meaningful funeral.

"Do you have to pay your respects?" Amber asks.

"No, he was a rabbit at the time. I think I'm good."

We wander through the muck of the day. I catch snatches of conversations of people sharing parallel experiences, but it is hard even to knit them in a tone poem, to say nothing of coherence. We see one another, but I could not describe more than three. We are not in the same world this new year. When one woman greets us, I startle. When she continues her walk, I turn to Amber and say in mock horror, "How dare she perceive me."

I ask Amber, "If you could change one thing--" then I stop.

"What? What were you asking?"

"I already know your answer, and it made me sad."

"If I could change one thing about the last ten years, it would be to love ***Jareth more."

I expected them to say saving him by knowing to intervene sooner. They have said this before, which is why I do not want them to say so now. Maybe they know there was no way to save him, but we could have saved ourselves more by loving this wee doomed beastie.

I suggest other things: My getting medication and therapy sooner. Making them call out the day they injured their ankle catastrophically.

"But maybe not that one," I amend. "I'm not sure you go back to school without that."

"I might have been thinking about it anyway."

We cannot slog through these subjunctives, the "what might have been," with any seriousness, nor can we be too upset by the paths that brought us here for another calendar year together. Still, for completion's sake, I mention wishing we had not added hours to a ***trip on our ***honeymoon to visit a lighthouse barely better than one would find on a mini-golf course.

Our 2024 is uncertain. I look around Red Hook, a town I thought I might leave in the rearview, with something like contrition. "Oh, yes. I did say I might leave you, but--how lucky!--you are stuck with me a little longer."

We reach the other, more traditional but lesser gazebo. Gazing at the Hudson just past the train tracks, I say, "You can't get a view like this in Ithaca."

Amber pauses reflectively over a markedly prettier view with flowers instead of mud. "You can absolutely get a view like this in Ithaca. Maybe not with the bridge."

"How often do you look at a bridge and envision what it would look like crumbling from an earthquake?"

"Almost never," they say. "I mostly imagine shooting arrows at balloons under them to get Deku seeds."

We walk, discussing more how one effectively communicates according to their book.

"Do you think there is a master communicator who can fully convey themselves?" Amber asks.

"I don't think that's possible. It would be too much power. They'd be Lucifer--from the show, not the Bible. 'What is it you truly desire?'"

"Except it isn't what they truly desire."

"No," I grant. It is"—I struggle for the proper term—"what your id most wants. Your true desire is deeper than wanting to bang someone."

"That's a surface-level desire."

"The true desire is the layer pulled back until you comprehend what that desire represents at its core. Maybe you want love you didn't get when you were young." It is too pat and obvious, which people are not. My true desire is not phrasing that better.

I do not know what my true desire is this coming year. I can point to layers: new companions, more books published (if not read; a present tense audience has become secondary). I can speak to their sources and antecedents, but I cannot say they are themselves my truest desire.

At home, Amber asks if the auguries allow us to shower on New Year's Day. They as quickly say they don't want to know as they are already disrobed. I do a quick search, passing over Korean superstition involving anything water-related, washing all luck away, and settle on someone saying one should do on New Year's Day what one would want to do the rest of the year. I have eaten well, hiked, read, wrote, been intimate with my partner, and will shower. It's hard to beat that, though I wiggle against Amber in the shower and say that will have to qualify as dancing, as I have no intention of stopping doing that.

last watched: Resident Alien
reading: This Is How You Lose the Time War