25 on 25: Ending the Year in the Most Beautiful Way I Know How

This month I went back to the office to clear my desk. We’re downsizing the office space and the floor I used to sit on is up for rent on German eBay, for a whopping 8392 euros per month. I found my 2020 New Yorker calendar where I left it, on the 19th of February, the last normal day of work. That day’s cartoon depicts a woman sitting on the couch as a suited man enters the room. The caption reads: You come home to find me eating beans from a giant can. How do you think my day went?

‍The 19th of February, frozen in frame, feels apocalyptic. It is a reminder that what used to matter no longer matters. Objects have become incongruous to what we refer to as “reality”, or “the new normal”. What this really means is they’ve become incongruous to us.

*
‍
We are obsessed with time. How to stretch time, to lose time, to make time, to kill time, to fold time. We want to do so many things with time. Mostly, we want to stop time.
‍
The sadness of unused objects lies in their inability to adapt and their eventual irrelevance, and a calendar is the most explicit expression of this. The world suffered a collective shock this year that upended everything we knew, so why should anything be exempt? Perhaps when we fear the passage of time, what we really fear is stasis amidst change.
‍
*
‍
Right now, stripped of all its usual markers, time feels suspended.
‍
But our bodies are the most honest keepers of time. Neither is forgiving to the other.

*

After I left New York last October, I made a list of things I’d left behind in my little glass apartment. A fat glass of body oil that hits like a heap of earth, a particularly oversized sweater, a Michelin man puffer rejected by antiquated male standards of beauty.
‍
When I picture the empty apartment now I picture these objects right where I left them. I made a list as if to say: I’ll come back for you.

*

In a different time, music is playing.

~~
by Patrice Liang

Time moves as always in its linear, unrelenting fashion, but something towards the end of the day makes time stop. The sun, tracing its slow arc through the sky, accelerates as it reaches the horizon, a kamikaze pilot on a suicide mission. Moments before impact, it pours its light into the city streets like liquid gold, as if jettisoning the last of its fuel. Then, the bloody collision. The liquid gold catches fire. Its colors multiply, a million hues spill into the sky and all around you. Standing at a busy intersection, you stare up at the beautiful mess. Perhaps you try to grasp for a word to describe the color, but as soon as you find one, the color changes. Crimson, magenta, cobalt, lilac. There are more you cannot name.

Twilight. This is the moment of death and rebirth, of sudden and utter transformation. All appears different and new. In every town and city, men and women are making their own transitions, slipping from the realities of the day to their dreams of the night. The light is going fast, but there is still time: the street lamps have not yet come alive. The streets, sleepy in the midday sun, now awaken and surge with a million souls, their steps quickening with anticipation, for there there are still gifts to buy, clothes to change, cologne to wear and lingerie to shimmy into.

Then, as if coming out of hiding, the neon signs flicker on. Shops and restaurants, their interiors once overshadowed by the light of day, are now lanterns in the night, each a bejeweled display case. In those few precious moments, while the lights of the city are multiplying into a million stars but before the sky's final hues of indigo blue finally fade into black, the world hangs in balance, and everything is possible. Promises can still be made, they have not yet been broken. Ahead lies the infinite hope and mystery of the night.

~~
by Justin Liang

Press play to listen to the music made to be paired with the writing!