Day 1

New Year's Eve
December 31, 2009
8:30 pm

I’m here with Annelies and Bryan, and we are all looking fantastic and spectacular in our sparkly New Years’ finery; we are drinking Chimay and telling awkward family Christmas stories, and the youth of New Orleans buzz around us like golden flies, and there is a girl behind me with translucent aqua wings on.

Outside, the moon is still impossibly huge, hanging in the sky like gray flesh. It’s still early, and our evening has already given us some things to talk about: biking through the Bywater with plastic cups of Andygator, we have been rained upon by the over-the-top fireworks of the neighbors; we have given New Years greetings to a man on a dark porch, alone except a radio, a dog, and something that looks like a rifle; we have been fed surprisingly flavorful red beans at the Yellow Moon by a tall muscular drag queen named Loren, clad in a pink lace bikini and a wig made entirely of curly silver ribbons.

And now we are at Mimis and we are beautiful and the world is beautiful and everyone in the bar, shining and be-sequined, is beautiful. The ‘70s soul music dance party that has made New Years here legendary is still hours off, and by then we will have moved on. Our bikes will take us all over the city; I will eventually pick up a beautiful surprising new lover; before I take him home we will dance to hip hop and circus-punk music, and the band will throw handfuls of cooked spaghetti at us, and we will serenade each other with poetry in multiple languages and entertain all manner of illicit adventures and the moon will continue to rise over us until it looks, again, like part of the world instead of a part of our bodies, and we will melt into the glistening swirl of people that make our world a little more vibrant than the whole rest of the world, but for now all this is still in the future, and for now I have another sip of Chimay with my comfy old friends, and we each tell another grandmother story in the blue candlelight, glittering in anticipation as 2009 wanes, grey like all that smoke, toward the shadowy ceiling and up into the dark dark night.