Lately, it feels like time has left me behind. A finals week apparently doesn't feel like finals without the exchange of small gifts and warm words between stressed teenagers, and Christmas doesn't feel Christmas-y without the being a tad more than fashionably late to an obligatory family get together at Mà's house where we smile and get presents that will be returned the next week. 

This winter break, like the majority of the year, has been different. Not necessarily good different or bad different but like many things, a healthy mixture of both. I can't hate 2020, and I won't hate 2020. Because, though bitter, quarantine gave me YWP. It gave me a better sense of self, and it gave me many realizations that, though many led to more journeys than actual ends, was more satisfying than anything I had found before.

Earlier in the evening (or yesterday, now), I asked my mom what the fuss of the New Year was. Time is, after all, a continuous string of breaths and dust, of life and death. Tomorrow, I would be just the same as today. But really, she said, the calendar is about hope. We divide time into years and months and weeks and days and hours to the finest decimal of a second, chopping the stream of consciousness into manageable particles. And we create hope, in this way. Because there are numbers and labels and zodiac luck charts that tell us the change is upon us, because it is often so easy to remember that even in silence there is the mindless wander of the electrons around nuclei in atoms that found existence. 

But even knowing this, I played the game today, too. I looked up my Chinese zodiac, even if the ox will not quite begin its trek until February, when the rose petals of the Western New Year have long lost their luster. I watched fireworks bloom on TV and rejoiced when the confetti rained down in New York City. Because maybe tomorrow will feel just like today and yesterday, but tomorrow I will know the potential of the pulse in my wrist. And maybe that will make all the difference.

Happy New Year, and welcome to the 2021 :)