Toast to what?

#newyearseve 

I've always hated the New Year's Eve party. The only day in which - I who am supremely and irreducibly antisocial - feel alone as hell.

Maybe because I have a mythical vision of the New Year's party. I remember the first one I attended, which was also the first concession by my parents to go out under the cover of darkness. "At midnight at home", my father thundered, as if I were Cinderella, but my mother objected: "How can she celebrate the New Year if she has to be home at midnight?"

My father gave up and I came back late, my head spinning and my ears ringing with so many emotions. I had spent the evening doing wallflower in a corner, moving my feet to the dance rythm but too shy to step forward. I was fifteen, wearing a black velvet skirt, nylon stockings, a lurex sweater that my mother had bought for herself many years ago but had never used. I was bored until a boy, whose face I do not remember, invited me to dance. His immaculate shirt smelled of Brut, he was a couple of years older than me. He immediately asked me to get together. I replied with the fateful phrase: "Let's remain friends". Two days later he came to get me back to school but I, frightened by that thing bigger than me, remained locked in class so as not to be seen. And then I learned that he went out with another girl. A sad short story of a love that never began.

But the fact of receiving my first love request from a boy on the evening of the last day of the year, made this holiday so mythical in my memories that, after, no other time has ever been at that height.

It's not that I don't like the last day of the year, it's that I like it too much, that, at almost sixty, I still imagine myself dressed as Cinderella at the first dance, or as Beauty whirling with Beast in a magnificent hall. But reality is made up of loose fries and rancid peanuts, of hats, little trains and Brigittebardotbardot ... Or of lonely evenings with my husband, who is at the computer in another room while I am already falling asleep over the speech of the president of the republic.

And this year more than ever, I just can't imagine myself toasting. Toast to what? At the end of a horrible, bisest and fatal 2020, during which, apart from the landing of extraterrestrials - still possible - anything happened? A year where, on a planetary, global level, our certainties have collapsed, we have risked our lives every day, we have suffered grief, illness, suffering, freedom denied for our good? A year of innocent house arrest? A year without travel, culture, hugs? Or, perhaps, should I toast to a 2021 that already promises to be equally difficult and heavy?



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