When the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve, I felt lucky and lonely all at once. It was the end of a year in which I'd thought a lot about romantic relationships -- my own, my friends', my parents'. Even the strangers whose stories filled the Modern Love column, and the random couples spotted kissing on empty streets.
This year, love and loss were front and center. For some, romantic connections got better with consistent shared time. Finding love became more accessible, through forums like video dating. For others, relationships didn't last or never started -- thanks to the pressure to get more serious, the distance that seemed longer, the stress of living in the same space, the political divides. Most of us, at some point, felt lonelier than ever. It was impossible to ignore love, and more pressing than ever to consider and craft our own romantic priorities.
For me, 2020 was a year of feeling enamored and desired and hurt. I shut the door on a love that lasted too long. I fell for friends and strangers, often at the wrong time: dancing, steam-tunneling, swiping, traveling, letter-writing, running, facetiming. In Charlottesville. And in Charlottesville again. He found someone else. I did, too. We kissed. I stayed the night. I read poetry on the feeling of electricity. I was scared of crossing lines. I tried to be bold. I got better at loving myself. I cried, but most of the time, I didn't.
Through everything, I learned. It's easy to view love as something that happens to us: we "fall" into it, it's a matter of "luck." In reality, love is a skill to be mastered -- like music, writing, cooking -- obtained from experience. You collect new romantic experiences until one day, you meet the person who you believe is "the one". Past romances serve as reference posts, "callbacks," to help you determine if this one person is better than all the people you've been with before. You can't possibly find your "perfect match" given the hundreds of options out there (especially now, with a pandemic that restricts those options significantly). But each new romance helps you get a little closer to understanding what you want, and understanding yourself -- so that when the best option arrives, you're ready to hold your breath, open your heart, and fall after all.
This week, poems about new years, old loves, and what we learn from both.
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Fragments for the End of the Year
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
On average, odd years have been the best for me.
I’m at a point where everyone I meet looks like a version
of someone I already know.
Without fail, fall makes me nostalgic for things I’ve never experienced.
The sky is molting. I don’t know
if this is global warming or if the atmosphere is reconfiguring
itself to accommodate all the new bright suffering.
I am struck by an overwhelming need to go to Iceland.
Despite all awful variables, we are still full of ideas
as possible as unsexed fruit.
I was terribly sorry to be the one to explain to the first graders
the connection between the sunset and pollution.
On Venus you and I are not even a year old.
Then there were two skies.
The one we fly through and the one
we bury ourselves in.
I appreciate my wide beveled spatula which fulfills
the moment I realized I would grow up and own such things.
I am glad I do not yet want sexy bathroom accessories.
Such things.
In the story we were together every time.
On his wedding day, the stone in his chest
not fully melted but enough.
Sometimes I feel like there are birds flying out of me.
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New Year's Eve
by Tatiana Ernuteanu
I waited for the golden hour – the day, the night.
I waited for the winter to pass, I waited for the lunch to be eaten,
To see your shoes by my feet.
On New Year’s Eve I cried because of evocative memories,
Dressed in my most precious dress –
To put some dignity on me too.
I broke all my cups – because they were two,
And I told myself that you loved me, tight,
Maybe only once
But you loved me.
My fine sandals carried my love debut all night –
From kitchen to terrace, on the pathways to your heart
It was such an arduous journey.
waits, waiting, waited
– Such a beautiful lexical family.
The hope gets everywhere,
Even on the third floor
Where I saw it in the morning –
It was standing in a planter full of snowdrops.
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In Winter
by Michael Ryan
At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.
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Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
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Opposing Forces
by Eamon Grennan
Even in this sharp weather there are lovers everywhere
holding onto each other, hands in one another’s pockets
for warmth, for the sense of I’m yours, the tender claim
it keeps making—one couple stopping in the chill
to stand there, faces pressed together, arms around
jacketed shoulders so I can see bare hands grapple
with padding, see the rosy redness of cold fingers
as they shift a little, trying to register through fold
after fold, This is my flesh feeling you you’re feeling.
It must be some contrary instinct in the blood
that sets itself against the weather like this, brings
lovers out like early buds, like the silver-grey catkins
I saw this morning polished to brightness
by ice overnight. Geese, too: more and more couples
voyaging north, great high-spirited congregations
taking the freezing air in and letting it out
as song, as if this frigid enterprise were all joy,
nothing to be afraid of.
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