New Year’s Eve is haunted, or it haunts me. Which way it works, I’m really not sure. Out of the cobwebs crawl the names and faces. None ever forgotten, but at times pushed to the background as life’s busyness demanded my attention.
It’s a day of reaffirmation and atonement. Not so much nostalgia as a reckoning. The specters come out as the early afternoon sun drops behind the hills to sit with me, until the room in the dim light seems full. They all just want to once again simply be. They don’t come in anger or judgment; they want nothing from me but acknowledgment they existed; we existed.
I’m reminded now how much I’ve skated and slid through the passage of years until now I come to face my crimes. Some, then, in my chemical coma, amused me, but now chill me in terror.
Once again, I ask myself the question I’ve asked for decades: why did I escape, when so many others got what was fully deserved?
How many times I’ve stood before the casket, wishing I knew how to pray for souls and answers, but feeling nothing but the rush of the close call, the dodged bullet, the next in a long line of escapes to make Houdini proud. How many times I’ve morphed and adapted to be whatever I decided to be and left these boys, loyal soldiers and brave volunteers in the wake of my madness? In how many ways am I no better than the generals who hide far from the fight, I condemn for their egos and bloodlust.
I can’t offer an apology to these ghosts who sit before because me, I don’t think they hear me. They sit in the sullen solitude with me, and I feel a very large piece of me has died as each one them has died until nothing of the energetic young criminal I was once remains, all that remains is me. An empty vessel full of remembrance that wakes at three in the morning, and after that is rarely allowed to fall back to sleep.
I’ll sit in congress with my ghosts again this New Year’s Eve and ponder again why I’ve escaped their fate. Knowing I’m not more worthy or gifted, simply lucky. Blessed or cursed my entire life with dumb luck and escaping a half step ahead of what chases me. I’ll sit with them now and wonder when my luck finally runs out and I join them, and I’m asked to account and confess my sins, what will I say to explain my betrayal.
