Someone once told me that the way you spend your New Year's Eve is the way you will spend the rest of your year. For someone who goes out as frequently as I do, travels far and wide, and is constantly meeting new people, I find this concept more difficult to swallow than that $4 bottle of champagne your friend brought to the party. If this anonymous prophecy is correct, then 2007 will be filled with a couple good friends in a city I'm just getting to know better, a few random girls who wish I were straight and a whole gaggle of guys who are glad that I'm not. Yep, sounds about right.
When I look back on the New Year's Eves of yore, I can't help but be a little disturbed by how accurate that prediction turned out to be. Freshman year, I drove a couple hours to be with a girlfriend from school I hardly knew and a boy I had never met, only to get so amazingly drunk that I passed out before we could hook up. This ushered in 2004, a year that saw me in the hospital, jail and certainly more beds than I care to remember, certainly a year that should follow such a sloppy Eve.
Sophomore year I spent my first New Year's Eve in a big city and my best friend and I crashed a party in her building by fabricating our identities. In 2005, I crashed Europe's party by studying in both Rome and London with a summer interlude in D.C. A fake ID gained me access to D.C.'s bars and studying abroad allowed me to reinvent myself each step of the way.
As 2006 approached, it didn't seem like it was getting any easier to sort out my true identity, and that New Year's, I returned to party with my best friend but spent most of the night alone. My short-term, long-distance boyfriend was away and my friend was occupied at work until almost midnight. By the time she arrived, I was too tired to stay up much longer. I spent most of last year alone, figuring out where I was headed, what I wanted, with only the subtlest suggestions of relationships to interfere.
This year, some of my friends spent New Year's Eve at home, either deciding it's where they were meant to be all along or realizing it was a place they could never return to for good. Others went to hot parties and clubs, some to hotels, cabins or resorts, accepting that they had no idea what the year had in store for them - just content to go out in style and hopefully make it to the next day.
I read my horoscope, ask questions to Magic 8-Balls and even appreciate the wisdom of fortune cookies. Though I know none of these sources are accurate predictors of our future, and although I know one night can never determine how our year will unfold, I can't help but think that as each of us rang in 2007, we may have set the course for our year ahead. Or perhaps New Year's Eve can just serve as a warning for what might lay ahead if we don't adjust our sails. Maybe New Year's is the last observation tower we get with which to redirect our lives.
No matter what you believe, one thing is certain: New Year's Eve may not be the most important or even the most fun night of our year, but these are supposed to be the most fun years of our lives. This New Year's signaled the last of these for me. Like the night that ushered it in, I'm sure it will be one of surprises, reunions, adjustment, fear, excitement, periods of boredom and inebriation, and certainly longing for whom and what was left behind or far away. And maybe if I'm lucky, many opportunities to turn down the offer to accompany a stranger home to Brooklyn.
