Twenty-Two Years Old On New Year's Eve Poem by Winsy Tink

What does one do on New Year’s Eve? What is the cause for celebration on New Year’s Eve at all? I suppose New Year’s Eve is different from the other 364 days of the year, because on this day of champagne and confetti and cheers of rejoice, I feel a heightened sense of what has been lying under the surface on all those other days. Oh yes, that old friend called – Loneliness.

For a long while, I have misunderstood my loneliness as a preference for solitude. It took me a few years to realize that the weight dragging me down stemmed from a desire for self-effacement rather than an eccentric pride. I brought it upon myself. I decline invitations to big parties, gatherings with old school friends, and rendevous with new acquaintances. I had the chance not to be lonely, but I chose otherwise.

What shall I do on New Year’s Eve? I shall watch a movie, any movie, alone. I shall spend the afternoon in a coffee shop and, behind a book, watch excited spirits discuss their new year resolutions. I shall venture into the hustle and bustle, mingle with the crowds in the road-crossings, count the minutes before the traffic lights change. Tonight, I shall decline an invitation to countdown in a bar in Stanley, tuck myself up neat and tight, and listen to the story told a thousand times over by the ticking hands of the clock.

Why do I do this to myself? The honest answer is, I don’t know. Isn’t twenty-two an age of contradictions and of self-victimisation? It is that awkward phase in your life when you have just entered adulthood without fully understanding the implications of it, when you have just left childhood and cannot look back to it. People think you know what you’re doing, or expect you to know what you’re doing, but you don’t. It is an in-joke between you and yourself only.

Search deeper, annoying self. Honestly – honestly – Isn’t it also for the love of playing the victimized heroine in this self-inflicted tragedy? Isn’t it also an attempt to blame all your handicaps and disappointments on circumstance? All those things I could have done, but did not do – all those times my ideals have turned against me (perhaps I was the one turning against my ideals, rather) – sowed the seeds of an alter ego that outgrew my real self. But then again – what’s wrong with wanting to be loved? To desire to be noticed? To be absorbed but not lost in the metropolitan lights, flashing fantastic streams of red and green and white and gold and blue? In my perfectly-scripted live tragedy, the heroine always bows her way out amid thundering applause. She is, at all times, well loved and remembered by an audience no less imaginary than any faith or religion known in this world.

Fate smiled upon me from the moment I was born. I have more than anyone can wish for. I ask too much, but still I ask! Because I am plainly unthankful, unrepentant and impertinent. Or because I am nothing but twenty-two years of selfish and incomprehensible thought. But consider me – a girl, angry, lost, whatever you will – if you would just consider me.