New Year's Day

“I want your midnights / But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day.”

-- “New Years Day” by Taylor Swift

“Wild night?”

I take in his bed head as Josh stirs awake on the couch. His eyes are groggy and he’s still in last night’s now-wrinkled clothes. He makes a show of standing up and stretching his limbs, then walks over and slides onto one of the bar stools at the kitchen counter I’m wiping down with Lysol. I avoid his eyes, trying not to stare. 

“Something like that.” He grins and runs a hand through his hair, only messing it up even more. “What about you, Syd? Wild night?”

I scoff and continue scrubbing the counter, pushing aside an empty red solo cup so I can wipe the mysterious dried liquid from beneath it. 

“The wildest,” I tell him. 

The truth? I was in bed by 12:30, earplugs in, the two glasses of wine I had earlier lulling me to sleep as the party raged on into the new year outside my door. 

“I’m sure,” he says sarcastically, rolling his eyes.

I toss the plastic cup into the overflowing trash and tie the bag off. 

“Hey, give me some Tylenol for this headache and I’ll help you clean up,” he offers. 

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

I want him to. And I don’t want him to. 

I want him to stay and help because I miss him. I miss us. He’s my oldest friend, the one who’s been by my side for the longest time. We played in my backyard when we were little, and I would catch lighting bugs and set them free, and he would squash them between his fingers and make me cry, but then pick flowers for me to make me feel better. We were never all that similar--me, the kind of person who read books on Friday nights; him, the kind that everyone asked to go to their parties. But somehow, through high school and most of college, we were always us. 

Until this year, when we started drifting apart and I realized I loved him. 

I reach into the cupboard and root around, shoving aside bottles of medicine that Josie and I have accumulated over the past two semesters. My fingers land on the bottle of Tylenol and I toss it to him. 

“Thanks,” he says. I avert my gaze as he opens the bottle and pops a few in his mouth. He walks over to the sink and drinks directly from the spigot while I yank the full trash bag out of the bin. 

“Can you take this downstairs?” 

I hold it out to him and look away as he wipes water from his mouth. He takes it and slings it over his shoulder. 

“Back in a flash,” he says, slipping out the door. 

As soon as it clicks closed, I find myself leaning against the sink, looking down into the drain and struggling to catch my breath and collect my racing thoughts. I suddenly feel sick and hungover, and I barely even drank anything last night. 

What do I know? 

I know I love him. I’ve loved him for years. Maybe even since he picked those flowers for me in the backyard on those summer nights, dead firefly residue still glowing on his fingers and making me squirm with disgust.

Or maybe since middle school, when he wouldn’t dance with Jillian Meyers, the most popular girl in the grade, because he overheard her calling me a rat-faced teacher’s pet after I was the only one to get an A on our pre-algebra test. 

Or maybe it was high school, on that night he got his license and we drove past curfew on the winding roads of our stupid little small town with the windows down, listening to Tears for Fears at full volume because that was the only CD his dad had in his ancient sedan. 

I don’t know when it started, but I know it only hit me like a ton of bricks two months ago during Thanksgiving break. Up until then, the first semester of senior year, I knew I missed him, but I didn’t think anything of it. We were both wrapped up in school and clubs and internships, and I thought it was normal. And it was. We both had lives, and I knew that. 

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving rolled around and I went home and he didn’t that I realized things had changed. I looked at our text thread and realized I hadn’t heard from him in over two weeks, which was out of the norm. I texted him as Mom put the turkey in the oven and Dad sat on the couch watching the Macy’s Parade. 

Me: Hey! You wanna hang out tonight? 

Him: Sorry, forgot to tell u i’m not home 

Me: ?? 

Me: Where are you?

He never answered back after that. The next time he texted was two nights ago to find out what time the party was--the party I didn’t even want but agreed to because of Josie. 

The door squeaks open, pulling me from my thoughts. I start scrubbing the sink even though it’s not that dirty. The cleaning fumes invade my nose and make my eyes water, or maybe something else is causing that. 

“Where are the extra bags?”

I slide over and nod towards the cabinet under the sink. He bends down and opens it, leaning inside to pull out a new bag. I try not to notice how this is the closest we’ve been in months. 

“You wanna get breakfast? The café on the corner is open.” 

I shrug. Suddenly all my words are stuck lodged in my throat and everything I’ve been thinking and feeling about him since Thanksgiving have boiled to the surface. 

“Where’s Josie?”

“Work called her in.”

“Oh.”

I scrub the sink harder. I think I might scrub until the steel has worn away to reveal rust and our friendship has worn away to reveal nothingness. My fingertips are white from pressing so hard. 

He tosses an empty beer bottle into the new trash bag. It makes a loud thud as it hits the bottom of the bin. 

“Are you mad at me?” he asks suddenly, and I didn’t think I was, but suddenly I am. I am mad. I’m mad that he never replied to my text on Thanksgiving. I’m mad that he’s made absolutely zero effort to uphold our friendship since the start of senior year. I’m mad that he didn’t wish me a Merry Christmas in December or share any of his mom’s sugar cookies with me like he always did, because those are my favorite and I secretly like them way more than any of my mom’s cookies. 

I’m mad that I saw him hooking up with Josie through the cracked open door as I walked past her room last night, and I’m mad that I was alone as the clock struck midnight and everyone else was kissing in the new year. 

“No,” I say instead. 

“Really? ‘Cause it feels like you are.” 

It infuriates me that we haven’t talked in months, and he’s acting like nothing’s changed.

He tosses in another empty beer bottle before opening the fridge and pulling out a full one. I watch as he pops off the top with his teeth and takes a swig. For the first time since I watched him walk in last night, I give myself permission to really look at him. 

He’s changed. His hair is longer than he usually keeps it. Curlier. He’s started growing out the stubble along his jawline, though it’s hardly an attempt at real facial hair. His midsection is a little wider than I remember it, and the skin beneath his eyes a little darker. Josh has always been my best friend, my protector, my favorite person in the world, and now I look at him and I feel unsettled.

“What?” he asks, setting the now half-empty bottle on the counter. He’s caught me watching him. 

“Where have you been?” 

I let my sponge fall out of my hand and slide down the side of the sink. I’m frozen in place. I’m angry and sad and I want him to give me a reason why. I want to know why I’ve been left alone again and again by him. Why it’s Syd and Josh separate now instead of Syd and Josh. 

“I dropped out.” 

“What?” I automatically respond. I don’t think I heard him right. 

“I don’t technically go here anymore.” 

“Why would you do that? We’re graduating in like, less than four months!”

“College just isn’t for me, I guess,” he says, shrugging as he picks up his beer again. 

“So, so what? What are you going to do with your life? Go home and live some sad small town life chopping wood for your dad?” 

“I don’t know, maybe.” he says. “What’s so bad about that, Syd? Huh? Not all of us have to make money and be successful to be happy, you know.” 

“What the hell are you talking about? That’s not true and you know it. And this isn’t about me. I’m not the one who dropped out of college four months before graduation!”

“See this is why I didn’t tell you!”

He sets his empty bottle down a little too hard and I wince at the cracking noise it makes on the granite. He steps closer to me. 

“You don’t get to run my life! I didn’t even want to come to college. I only applied because you pushed me to for weeks, and I only got in because of basketball. My grades have always been shit.” 

“Wow, okay, I’m sorry I wanted to see you become someone!” I push back.

“I am someone! I am fucking someone, and I don’t need college to prove that, and I don’t need my parents or you breathing down my back!” he yells. 

“You had dreams!” I yell back, and can feel tears pricking behind my eyes and my hands are still soapy from scrubbing the sink. “What happened to starting your own business? To moving to a big city? What about us? What happened to us?!” 

“We changed!”

I shrink back, suddenly wanting space between us. I wipe my hands on my flannel pajama pants and look up at him as if seeing someone new--a stranger in my apartment who drunkenly wandered in off the street looking for spare change. 

I think about all the things I could say to him in this moment, and I know before even running through them in my mind that this will change us indefinitely, to the point of no return. 

“I loved you.” 

It’s his turn now to take a step back, and the few feet between us suddenly feels like a lifetime of squashed fireflies and uprooted flowers and middle school dances and drives past curfew and afternoons on the quad and sugar cookies at Christmas and change. 

I laugh, because at first there’s something so funny to me about how quickly we’ve become strangers. But then I realize maybe we were never so close to begin with. I flashback to all those moments between us running through my head. 

Me crying at the dead fireflies but grasping the wilted dandelions he picked for me. 

Josh dating Jillian Meyers only six months after he rejected her at that dance. 

Me asking for that first late night drive and every one after. 

Me studying on the quad. Him skipping class to avoid his finals. 

Sugar cookies from his mom, not from him. 

“You never loved me,” I tell him. “Not even as a friend.” 

“Syd,” he says in a voice that says be reasonable. 

“No,” I say. “We’ve always been different people, and I thought opposites attract and that’s what made us good friends, but it’s not.” 

“Sydney, I don’t--”

“I loved you,” I repeat. “I really did. As a friend, and as something more. But I am never going to be someone you want. I can’t. I can’t be the one you go to midnight parties and get wasted and hook up with. I’m just the old friend you never talk to and never text back, but you help clean up when you’re hungover the next morning.

“And I’m sorry if I pushed you to go to college and I’m sorry if I wanted more for you and I’m sorry that I didn’t think who you were was enough. I’m sorry that our friendship never meant as much to you as it did me. I’m sorry I’m not as fun or cool as Josie or anyone else you’ve ever loved, but I was there for you, and have you ever really been there for me?”

I’m crying now and I’m not sure my words are making sense to him or to me. Hot tears stream down my face and I don’t want to be here in this apartment alone with him any longer. I don’t want my past staring me in the eye anymore, reminding me how little it all meant--how little I mean to him now. 

“Syd--” he tries again, stepping closer to me this time, but I back away and head towards the door, grabbing my key from the hook on the wall. 

I open it and step out into the hall. He’s right behind me in the doorway, the threshold dividing us. 

“You’re right,” I tell him. “We’ve changed and we’re just too different now.”

“That’s not true. We’re still friends.”

“Why didn’t you ever text me back then?” 

It’s not a question with anger behind it anymore. It’s a question so small, so full of hurt and confusion, that it hurts to say. I can hardly hear myself say it, and part of me hates that I sound like a wounded animal, but another part wants him to know he hurt me--wants him to know how lonely and confused and angry I was when I texted him again and again and he never replied. 

He doesn’t have an answer, though, and neither do I, and maybe that is why we’ve changed so much. 

I leave him with all of his silent non-answers in the doorway of my apartment and walk down the hall, down the stairs, and out onto the sidewalk.

The air is cold and crisp and new. 

I breathe in. 

I let go. 

Maybe change is for the best.