I can identify the person who ruined New Year’s Eve for me, possibly, forever. I would be happy to pick him out of a line-up for you. He was an ex-boyfriend who never should have had the hold over me that he did. I realize this makes me sound bitter. That’s because I am. I have an axe to grind. And you, dear reader, are my whetstone. Ahh, the beauty of the Internet.
This guy was a real jerk. Primo assholio. But I was in love with him. Or at least infatuated with him, which at the time were interchangeable emotions in my life. Of course, being the gentleman that he was, he forewarned me early in the relationship of his supreme self-contempt, his selfishness, and his basic failures as both a boyfriend and a human being. I thought he was being hard on himself, and somewhere deep inside I saw a wounded bird that needed my love and support to fly again. Yuck.
It didn’t help that we worked together, this being how we became friends long before lovers. I delighted at being able to see him every single day, at work during the week and ensconced in his apartment and each other’s arms on weekends. Again, yuck.
By the time New Year’s—that bitch-slap of a holiday I already had misgivings about—rolled around, we’d been dating two and a half months. During that span of time, I professed my love for him, he had kind-of-sort-of, in a very childish way, professed his love for me, met my parents, and even, when I decided to move out of my sister’s apartment and find a place of my own, asked me to move in with him. I declined this romantic offer, of course, as we had been dating less than a month at that time and I knew he didn’t really mean it. But I digress.
I was seeing stars, blissfully happy—even when he was fulfilling his prophecy of being a self-involved bad seed—and hoping that for once, a New Year’s Eve celebration might hold the romance, joy, and promise that I saw in the new year it heralded. Oh, how wrong I was.
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