A New Year

The array of tree branches dancing in the wind outside look like an amoeba through the windows lens. Even when their movements come to a stop, they’re still moving; tiny, wiggling motions.

You’re still in bed, though you’ve been up since before 5:30 am, awakened by one of your recurring dreams – or perhaps by your cat loud incessant purring. Coffee would be comforting right now, as would donning your frozen toes with a pair of wool socks, but something keeps you in your bed.

Maybe to blame is the beauty of the brightening world outside of your frosty window – who couldn’t help but be transfixed by the black veins of the trees, a contrast against the bluish canvas of the January dawn – or perhaps you don’t rise as you wish to not disturb your slumbering family, or maybe you’re waiting for the 7:53am sunrise, one that’s a mere 20 minutes away.

Questions and thoughts flood your head, and not necessarily sad ones, neither, as would seem typical or cliche, but optimistic ones. It’s the first Monday of the new year, a holiday Monday, a time for what should be positivity.

You warm your hands on your warm midsection and try to focus your mind on the year ahead but something’s not right – or not wrong.

You realize it’s a new year, but it feels the same. You struggle to come up with a resolution, for could there ever be a more perfect time?: You’re alone with your thoughts, snuggled in your warm bed, a new day shedding light slowly into your room, but you can’t come up with anything to your satisfaction. Every promise or intention seems done before; even being a better you seems unoriginal – as maybe it should be. We are all human, after all.

After a while you give up because you’re distracted by the brightening chroma outside the window; the now periwinkle sky, splattered with imperfect blobs of white and peach cloud. The sun has risen now, though it’s only 7:47am, and you laugh internally at the inaccuracy of the weather network. You hear a small cough come from the next bedroom over and the sound of the slow, dreamlike adjustment of the covers and you remember that you’re not alone.

Suddenly, a stray, spindly branch raps against the window and you stop in your tracks. You hold your breath for a second, like you’ve been caught being by yourself, doing those things you do when you’re alone – even if it’s just thinking – and you come to what seems like a startling realization at the time. You rise slowly, first sitting on the bed, the cool air from outside of your cocoon refreshing your slept in skin. That first deep breath feels significant until you realize it isn’t and you smirk – maybe chuckle – because you remember the truth that the world isn’t so big after all. That you’re in it, and that maybe even the person in the next room, the next house, the next continent over, is doing the same thing as you are.

Later on you laugh at how silly it is that you were startled by the branch. You downplay important parts of your life to yourself and others like you always do – perhaps you make a joke about it to your friends and family because it’s embarrassing and oddly shameful to tell them the truth about how that moment felt, though we all feel it or have felt it – it’s funny how we do that.

But that’s the absurdity of life. How bizarre and contradictory is it that those huge moments often lead to a discovery that proves how non-special it was and is.

In that moment, you realize you are not special; that we’re not special, and it’s perhaps the most beautiful thought you’ve ever had.

You’re alive, present and – even when you hide from the world for a day or two – you’re never gone, never alone, never not a windowpane away from the world.