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Your Thoughts Exactly / Smoke Gets in Your Eyes on New Year’s Eve
« on: January 15, 2025, 11:55:29 AM »
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes on New Year’s Eve
Personal Essay by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor
The Old Year’s moment of leave-taking was nothing if not explosive, incendiary, and inflammatory. Altogether it was a loud, proud, one beautiful mess of an experience. New Year’s Eve 2025 was a send-off party, a demonstration of good wishes for someone or something that’s about to set out on a journey. The Old Year 2024 was, in fact, going away for good, never to return. Our fireworks displays were meant to see the year go off and go out in flamboyant flames. At the same time, we were ringing in the New Year, ushering in the start of 2025 A.D. by lighting and exploding firecrackers, rockets, pinwheels, Roman candles, and fountains that spout not water but flames.
For me, the cleaving of the years has always been a bittersweet encounter during which I find myself going through the motions of celebrating a death and a birth one after the other in very quick succession.
Gradually but eventually, all that sound and fury begin to signify nothing but smoke and the smell of something ending and dying, and in the hazy cold rainy morning after all get calm and not bright but foggy. So loud and clear, the sound of silence can now be heard all over the land. All that remains of the floral designs of varying colors in the previous night’s sky is our memory of the moment, our recollection of that turbulent event and experience.
With this in mind, I invariably return to recalling you, whom I had loved and lost and will never see again, no matter how hard I wish I may, or how desperately I wish I might.
At the beginning of the year, I resolve to forget you, every day from this day forward till the next breaking and breaching of the years, when I’d be making the same not-to-be-resolved resolution. I know it’s madness, something that I just have to do, for it makes me happy to be sad, to recall that singular experience when I loved only you and you loved only me.
It is like watching a fireworks display—you know that the joy of it will be brief and short—a rapture you know will only end in naught but grief and sorrow. There’s nothing you can do about it; it’s the way things are, for even despair is an experience worth keeping and remembering.
One goal of life is to collect experiences and memories of those experiences, and to realize what we’ve become because of them. The only thing that’s written in stone is that nothing lasts. Our remembrance of things past is akin to taking snapshots and photos that capture fleeting moments for all time, that render quick time experiences the hard permanence of fossils.
All that love is dead, yet something ineffable and unutterable lives and remains inside my heart and in my mind, calling and calling—like a foghorn blaring signals to ships in foggy weather such as this. Remembering is a process of resurrecting, of retrieving, and of redeeming memories from the fogbank of the past, of what was lost and could not be found, bringing all that’s dead to life, again and again, for as often as we want it, for as long as we want to.
We can only stage firework spectacles but not claim ownership of the light, sound, and noise they produce. We cannot possess what can, after all, burns, explodes, and is gone in the blink of an eye. We can only sense, we can only feel the instance and the moment of the blooming and blossoming of the fireworks against the night sky’s black velvet backdrop on New Year’s Eve.
We should not even think of owning or possessing what we truly love, for if you love what you have even for the briefest of time, you will have what you love for all time.
Personal Essay by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor
The Old Year’s moment of leave-taking was nothing if not explosive, incendiary, and inflammatory. Altogether it was a loud, proud, one beautiful mess of an experience. New Year’s Eve 2025 was a send-off party, a demonstration of good wishes for someone or something that’s about to set out on a journey. The Old Year 2024 was, in fact, going away for good, never to return. Our fireworks displays were meant to see the year go off and go out in flamboyant flames. At the same time, we were ringing in the New Year, ushering in the start of 2025 A.D. by lighting and exploding firecrackers, rockets, pinwheels, Roman candles, and fountains that spout not water but flames.
For me, the cleaving of the years has always been a bittersweet encounter during which I find myself going through the motions of celebrating a death and a birth one after the other in very quick succession.
Gradually but eventually, all that sound and fury begin to signify nothing but smoke and the smell of something ending and dying, and in the hazy cold rainy morning after all get calm and not bright but foggy. So loud and clear, the sound of silence can now be heard all over the land. All that remains of the floral designs of varying colors in the previous night’s sky is our memory of the moment, our recollection of that turbulent event and experience.
With this in mind, I invariably return to recalling you, whom I had loved and lost and will never see again, no matter how hard I wish I may, or how desperately I wish I might.
At the beginning of the year, I resolve to forget you, every day from this day forward till the next breaking and breaching of the years, when I’d be making the same not-to-be-resolved resolution. I know it’s madness, something that I just have to do, for it makes me happy to be sad, to recall that singular experience when I loved only you and you loved only me.
It is like watching a fireworks display—you know that the joy of it will be brief and short—a rapture you know will only end in naught but grief and sorrow. There’s nothing you can do about it; it’s the way things are, for even despair is an experience worth keeping and remembering.
One goal of life is to collect experiences and memories of those experiences, and to realize what we’ve become because of them. The only thing that’s written in stone is that nothing lasts. Our remembrance of things past is akin to taking snapshots and photos that capture fleeting moments for all time, that render quick time experiences the hard permanence of fossils.
All that love is dead, yet something ineffable and unutterable lives and remains inside my heart and in my mind, calling and calling—like a foghorn blaring signals to ships in foggy weather such as this. Remembering is a process of resurrecting, of retrieving, and of redeeming memories from the fogbank of the past, of what was lost and could not be found, bringing all that’s dead to life, again and again, for as often as we want it, for as long as we want to.
We can only stage firework spectacles but not claim ownership of the light, sound, and noise they produce. We cannot possess what can, after all, burns, explodes, and is gone in the blink of an eye. We can only sense, we can only feel the instance and the moment of the blooming and blossoming of the fireworks against the night sky’s black velvet backdrop on New Year’s Eve.
We should not even think of owning or possessing what we truly love, for if you love what you have even for the briefest of time, you will have what you love for all time.
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