It’s New Year’s Eve, 2017. I’ve been sleeping in my chair. I just moved to the bed. Everyone is sick here. Hannah and Enora are in a terrible state; they’re in mortal combat with the flu with body temperatures over 100 degrees. Both have painful coughs. Neither has eaten for at least two days. Ancel is at his dad’s New Year’s party, meeting with his friends for an intense game of Dungeons and Dragons. I made a delicious dip but no one wants it. I drank a huge glass of fresh orange and lemon juice with rum and I guess that’s why I fell asleep. Big, big exciting night approaching.

This is nothing new. If I had somewhere to be, it would be a miracle. I’m usually disappointed in New Year’s Eve, anyway. I’ve never been to a party. I’ve never shared my life with anyone who’ll stay, up. I can’t tell you how many years I’ve watched the ball drop in New York City, watching TV while huddled on the couch alone, while Jack slept in the bedroom. And me? Wondering if the rest of the world was dancing. I’d stay there watching the entertainment, then I would dejectedly drift into bed wondering what exciting time I had missed. After thirty some years with Jack, I really never got used to not celebrating the leaving of one year and the coming in of another.

Once I met Ramiro, I must have been out on New Year’s Eve. He wouldn’t have stayed home. He was a young Cuban man. A tremendous dancer with an unquenchable thirst for life. Why can’t I remember? I can’t remember. I’m sure we were either out dancing at Andrea’s Cha Cha’s Club or at Guave and Natasha’s house where there was always a party. Maybe that’s why. Maybe it was because we were always out dancing or at a house party.

My saddest New Year’s Eve was when the Gregorian calendar turned to the year 2000, my first year without him. After three years, it was over, but it was a slow death. He wouldn’t come home. I had been too mean. A menopausal mean. The worst kind of mean. I didn’t know what had turned me into a dissatisfied screaming ‘jeemy’, and he had decided that if I kicked him out one more time, he wasn’t coming back. This was the last time. Though I begged him to come home and though we still loved each other, he was cold, like a stone. My pleading was useless, so I moved on. I tried for eight months. I dated others, but I wasn’t forgetting. I made plans to leave Portland to try to start over. To try to forget him. If he didn’t know where I was, he might leave me alone, might not call, might not come over every night.

So, I moved. I didn’t tell him where I lived. I house sat for Casey and Karen while they went to spend three months in an ashram in India. That should do until I left for Tallahassee, Florida having accepted a graduate fellowship at Florida State University. I would start winter semester. I decided to leave in December so that I could take the train to regroup, to try to pull myself together. While staring out the windows, I watched as each state flew by. How much farther away could I move while staying on the continent of contiguous states. How many degrees of separation would it take to get over him?

I planned to stop in Nogales, Arizona for a couple of days, to visit my good friend, Mary Beth. Mary Beth had traveled with me to Mexico. She had spent days and nights with Ramiro and me… cooking dinner, bringing sacks of food and liquor to the house, dancing and laughing and loving the nights and days away. After Ramiro left, she spent days, nights and weeks trying to console me but I was sick nearly to death from heartbreak. Between Mary Beth and Tannis, I didn’t die, though there were days that I couldn’t breathe. I would arrive in time to spend New Year’s Eve with Mary Beth and then on to Tallahassee. Good plan, I thought.

In those months, I never stopped crying. Mary Beth met me at the train station where we caught a taxi to her apartment. I came as she had left me months before. I was lost, but she was kind. We dropped off my bags and caught another taxi to the restaurant/bar where she worked. She was going to have to work on New Year’s Eve, she told me. I was going to be alone. This was what I dreaded. We bought liquor, then stopped at a taqueria where we gorged on tacos. Then back to the house where she dropped me off so she could head back to work. I busied myself cleaning. listened to music and felt miserable.

The next day we crossed the border to explore Nogales, Mexico. We ate, did a bit of shopping and then home again. I was terrible company. A broken record, a swollen-faced gargoyle, a fountain of salty water and grief. Mary Beth was strong like a giant sequoia tree. She never would have fallen prey to drowning in sorrow. She knew her strength. She had left many loves behind. I wanted nothing more than to drown. New Year’s eve came.

I was home for the evening while she worked her shift. She had moved away from Portland months before. She was always wandering. She had closed her eyes and dropped her finger onto a map. Wherever it landed, she decided, would be her next move. She packed up, got on a bus and rented an apartment as far south as one could travel. She settled on the Mexican border. The front of the apartment faced south with a view from the depressed US town of Nogales, Arizona, to its sister city, the even more depressed city of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The kitchen’s plate glass windows ran along the full length of the south side of the building, looking across the border, a wall of steel, into Nogales, Mexico.

As night began to fall, I stood at the windows. I wasn’t hungry. I was beyond lonely so I would wait for Mary Beth to get off work when the bar closed. There would be no buses. Taxies would be few and far between. Her plan was, as it was every night, to walk home, alone, keeping to the gravel shoulder along the highway. She walked towards the border, for miles and miles, to reach her apartment. Never afraid.

I watched fireworks and listened to gunshots, watched the flares and the blue and red flashing lights of police vehicles and wondered what Ramiro was doing. At some point, I realized that bullets could come through those windows and kill me, so I spent the evening crawling around on the floor between the living room and the kitchen, standing just long enough to make another drink, hoping the walls were thick enough to stop a bullet. What did I know? When Mary Beth got home after a night on her feet, we drank until 4:00 in the morning, listening to ballads in Spanish. I needed to leave to catch my train though the sun was hours from bringing the light.

The scheduled taxi driver refused to wake, so we drug my suitcases through the black streets; I was carrying $600 in cash, all the money I had to start my life on the panhandle. I was paranoid, hung over, or more likely still drunk, but still, I had to catch the first train out of Nogales. I was running to Florida but really, I was trying to run from my broken heart.

Eighteen years later, I’m still running from that broken heart and New Year’s Eve hasn’t gotten any better. I don’t cry anymore and I don’t watch the ball drop alone anymore but like all the new year’s eves in my life, I wonder what I should be doing.