I wonder how love will bloom this New Year’s Eve. I wonder what kind of chaos will ensnarl itself in this year’s revelries. The hours leading up to the countdown and those first few fleshy pink hours of 2023 are critical. Critical in our human minds, anyway—Time and Space cannot care. And I wonder which way those hours will go and for whom and what it will eventually mean.

We all want to be new versions of ourselves with each New Year. But change is hard and it’s much easier to love the one you’re with. To tolerate the one you are.

I think about writing, “I think about writing nothing ever again, because what’s the point in it,” but that isn’t true; I never actually thought that, it’s just a thing that enters my head as something I could write. It’s the sort of thing someone might think, probably. Not this someone, though — no, probably, I’m too convinced of my own worthiness as a writer to ever consider simply not writing. What would be the point in that?

"...I didn’t wake up one morning and go, 'Tom Petty. I’m going to kill that guy.' That’s a whole other department that I have nothing to do with."