The coffee maker gurgles its familiar rhythm. Dawn seeps through blinds, gray light turning gold by degrees. The last day of the year. One more morning to figure out what that means.
I pour a cup and stand at the window. The world looks the same as yesterday. The trees don't know it's December thirty-first. The birds aren't taking inventory.
But something shifts anyway. Some internal accounting that happens whether you want it to or not.
There's a particular silence that comes with the final day of a year. Not the absence of sound; the refrigerator hums, a car passes somewhere distant, the house settles in the cold. It's a different kind of quiet. The pause between exhale and inhale. The held breath before the clock resets, and we pretend everything starts fresh.
I've stood at enough thresholds to know they don't promise anything. A doorway is just a doorway. What matters is whether you walk through.
The coffee grows cold in my hands. I don't drink it yet. Some mornings, the ritual matters more than the caffeine. The warmth against my palms; the steam rising and disappearing. Small proof that time still moves, even when it feels frozen.
Twenty-some years of carrying certain weights. Faces that visit uninvited. Moments that replay without permission. The mind is a projectionist who never clocks out, running the same reels in the dark hours, flickering images on the ceiling while sleep refuses to come.
Some nights I negotiate with ghosts. Other nights, I just let them sit beside me. We've learned to share the silence, these visitors and I. They no longer ask for explanations, and I don't offer apologies. We've moved past the need for words.
The calendar doesn't erase any of it. Midnight will strike, and the weight will remain, patient as stone, waiting in the spaces between heartbeats. It will follow me into the new year like luggage I never packed but can't leave behind.
People talk about endings like they mean something. Like the final page of a chapter closes with a satisfying click. Like you can draw a line under twelve months and call it complete.
But years don't end clean. They fray at the edges. They bleed into each other, one day indistinguishable from the next except for the arbitrary number we assign to it.
What happened this year? I could make a list. I could inventory the losses and gains, weigh them against each other like a shopkeeper counting the till. But the math never balances; it's not supposed to.
Some things can't be measured. Some things just are.
The light shifts. That particular winter gold that only lasts a few minutes before fading to plain morning. I watch it move across the floor, catching dust motes, illuminating nothing important.
But maybe that's the point. Maybe importance is something we assign after the fact, looking back at ordinary moments and deciding they mattered.
This moment doesn't yet know if it matters. Neither do I.
I've spent years learning to survive. Learning which breaths to count. Learning which memories to sit with and which to let pass like weather; I acknowledge them, feel them, and let them move through.
I build walls, then learn to put doors in them.
Then learning to leave the doors open, even when it's terrifying.
The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn is that you can't control who walks through.
Some mornings I wake up and the weight is manageable. A backpack I've learned to carry. I move through the day almost like a normal person, whatever that means. I laugh at things. I notice small things and the beauty of the world. I forget, for whole hours, that I'm someone who has seen what I've seen, done what I've done.
On other mornings, the weight pins me to the mattress like a physical force, and it feels as if gravity doubles. The ceiling becomes the whole world. Getting upright feels like a victory that deserves a medal no one will ever award.
Today is somewhere between. The weight is always there, but I'm standing. Coffee in hand. Watching the light change.
That counts for something.
A bird lands on the fence outside. Small thing. Brown and ordinary. It pecks at something invisible, finds what it was looking for or doesn't, and flies away. The entire interaction takes about 10 seconds.
I don't know why I keep watching the empty fence post after it's gone.
The work hasn't changed. Not surviving; I've done that, keep doing it, will do it again tomorrow and the day after. Survival isn't a task you complete. It's a practice, like breathing.
Not healing either. That word assumes an endpoint that doesn't exist. Some wounds close but stay tender. Some scars ache when the weather changes. Healing isn't a destination. It's a direction.
The work is building. Taking the materials at hand: the scars, the lessons, the borrowed time, the strange gift of still being here when others aren't, and constructing something that can hold weight.
Not a monument. Nothing that grand.
Just a life. Ordinary and sufficient. A structure that can shelter what needs sheltering. A roof that keeps out most of the rain.
I think about the mathematics of time.
How many years have passed since certain things happened? How many years have certain people been gone? The strange arithmetic of grief: someday I'll have mourned longer than I knew them. Someday, the after will outweigh the during.
What do you do with that knowledge?
You carry it.
You carry it, and you keep walking because stopping isn't an option, not really. The world keeps turning whether you participate or not. Might as well participate.
The coffee is cold now. I drink it anyway.
Cold coffee is still coffee. Imperfect days are still days. Damaged people are still people.
I learned that the hard way, and I keep learning it.
Tonight, the world will count down to midnight. Champagne corks, fireworks, and kissing strangers. The collective pretense that a clock striking twelve means something has changed.
Nothing will have changed. Tomorrow the sun will rise on the same world, the same problems, the same people carrying the same weights.
And yet.
And yet, there's something to be said for drawing a line. For pausing at the threshold and looking back before stepping forward. Not because it changes anything, but because the looking matters and the acknowledgment matters.
Acknowledging that “This is where I was.” That “this is what I carried.” That “this is what I survived.”
Someone told me once that the opposite of depression isn't happiness. It's vitality. It’s the simple act of being alive on purpose.
I think about that a lot.
Happiness comes and goes like the weather.
But vitality is the choice to engage, to show up, to keep building even when you're tired, even when the weight is heavy, even when you can't see the point; that's something you can practice.
That's something you can choose, again and again, until choosing becomes a habit and a habit becomes character and character becomes the person you're still in the process of becoming.
The bird comes back. Or a different bird. I can't tell.
It sits on the fence post, head tilting, watching the yard with the kind of attention I used to reserve for threats. Now I practice paying that kind of attention to ordinary things. The way light falls. The movement of small creatures. The slow breathing of a house at rest.
There's a whole world happening in the spaces between what we call important, and many of us don’t know how to see it.
I'll get through today.
That's not optimism but pattern recognition. I've gotten through thousands of days. Many of them harder than this one will be. The track record is solid.
Tomorrow I'll do it again with the same weight but a different number on the calendar.
That's all any of it is: doing it again. Waking up. Making coffee. Carrying what you carry. Finding reasons, or at least finding the absence of reasons not to.
The light is full now. It’s a plain winter morning, nothing special. The kind of day that will pass without anyone marking it, except that everyone will mark it. The last of three hundred sixty-five days.
What did I do with them?
Some I wasted. Some I survived. Some I actually lived, fully present, fully engaged. Most were somewhere in between; ordinary hours strung together into weeks and months that became a year that's now almost gone.
That's how it works. Not in grand gestures but in accumulated moments. Not in resolutions kept or broken but in small choices made and remade. The choice to get up. The choice to try. The choice to stay.
Tonight, I might pour a drink and sit in silence while the world celebrates. Let the old year go without ceremony.
Or I might go to bed early and let midnight pass unwitnessed. Let the new year arrive without me standing watch.
Both options feel equally valid, and both feel equally honest.
I rinse the cup. Set it in the rack to dry.
The last day of the year. The last morning before the calendar resets and we pretend something has ended, something has begun.
Nothing ends. Nothing begins. There's just the continuous unfolding, one day into the next, carrying forward everything we've carried so far.
The raw materials are the same: one life, already in progress, weighed down by everything it's accumulated.
The tools are what I've learned: how to breathe, how to wait, how to let things pass, how to stay.
I get to work.
Not because I know what I'm building or because I'm know it will matter.
I get to work because the alternative is standing still, and I've tried that. It doesn't work. The weight doesn't get lighter when you stop moving. It just settles deeper.
So I move.
What defines an ending isn't the calendar. Isn't the champagne or the countdown or the forced nostalgia of year-in-review montages.
It's the willingness to pause. To look at where you've been. To acknowledge the weight without letting it crush you.
And then, when midnight passes, and nothing has really changed, you keep going.
Not because you've healed or because you're ready, but because the sun will come up tomorrow, and you'll still be here, and that has to count for something.
The house is quiet. The last day is waiting.
Twelve more hours until the arbitrary line. Twelve more hours of this year, this version of time, this particular arrangement of days.
I step through the threshold.